{"id":160,"date":"2006-04-13T22:55:11","date_gmt":"2006-04-13T17:25:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wokay.in\/2006\/04\/13\/guns-lots-of-guns\/"},"modified":"2006-04-13T22:55:11","modified_gmt":"2006-04-13T17:25:11","slug":"guns-lots-of-guns","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/2006\/04\/13\/guns-lots-of-guns\/","title":{"rendered":"Guns. Lots of Guns."},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve been reading Samizdata<\/a> for a year and a half. It’s a British group blog which discusses libertarian principles.<\/p>\n

I agree with a lot of what is posted over there in theory, but yesterday’s and today’s news has made me appreciate one of their recurring themes on a deeper level: the importance of allowing people to possess firearms.<\/p>\n

For context, read this post by Skimpy<\/a> and the Metroblogging Bangalore post<\/a> on the rioting following Rajkumar’s death. Hooligans have used his death as an excuse to run amuck, destroying government and private property under a pretence of grief. They’ve been threatening business owners to shut down or else. MadMan<\/a> has written in by email that the police aren’t even bothering to protect anyone, they’ve simply asked everyone to close shutters for their own protection.<\/p>\n

Skimpy writes:<\/p>\n

No one talks about this one lost day of business for them. No one talks about the fresh bread ‘Iyengar’s Bakery’ would have baked this afternoon and was unable to sell because some goondas forced the shop shut. No one talks about the fact that half the city had to walk back home from work tonight, because the buses weren’t running.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

If the Iyengar’s Bakery manager had a gun behind the counter, he could have driven the mob away. He wouldn’t have had to shoot them: the threat would have been enough to control the hooligans, who would have been armed only with sticks. An armed passenger on a bus could have responded to stone-throwing mobs with warning shots.<\/p>\n

The obvious objection is that unrestricted gun ownership could lead to the hooligans owning guns too. I think this is not much of a problem- the important point is not whether the hoooligan has a gun or not, but whether the law abiding citizen does. A situation where 80 business owners and 20 hooligans both have guns is still preferable to one where the business owners are unarmed and the hooligans have hockey sticks. Also, a gun in the hands of the business owner is not meant to kill: it’s meant to threaten- to show the hooligans that he faces deadly consequences.
\nA much bigger problem is our justice system: if someone is arrested for killing a hooligan in self-defense, he could be arrested for murder or manslaughter and end up in police custody for years before the trial closed. Unless police procedure to such homicides is to not press charges, the backlog of cases in the courts could itself make a mockery of self-defence.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve been reading Samizdata for a year and a half. It’s a British group blog which discusses libertarian principles. I agree with a lot of what is posted over there in theory, but yesterday’s and today’s news has made me appreciate one of their recurring themes on a deeper level: the importance of allowing people […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-160","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-public-policy-and-politics"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7AOU2-2A","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/160","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=160"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/160\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=160"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=160"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=160"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}