|
Gun Control and the War on Drugs
Anthony Gregory
Campaign
For Liberty
Thursday, February 11th, 2010
Many opponents of gun control support the war on drugs, and
many critics and reformers of America's drug laws tend to believe
in gun control. Conservatives tend to fall into the first category
and liberals into the second.
In reality, these two issues are more similar than many people
might think.
In both cases -- laws that restrict which guns people may buy,
own, and carry; and laws that restrict which drugs people may
buy, possess, and ingest -- what we're dealing with are possession
crimes: victimless offenses against the state, whereby merely
having something is branded a crime and punishable by fines
and imprisonment.
Both types of laws are terribly immoral, as they are affronts
to basic personal liberty. In a free society, all individuals
own themselves and the products of their labor and exchange,
and are free to do as they wish so long as they do not commit
violence and fraud against other people. Arresting, prosecuting,
and incarcerating people for the weapons they choose to own
or the drugs they choose to consume are immoral violations of
the rights of self-ownership, and the corollary rights to control
one's own body and property.
The right to self-ownership necessarily implies the right to
self-defense and the right to peacefully acquire the means of
self-defense. Hence, all gun control immorally violates the
right to self-defense and self-ownership.
The right to self-ownership implies the right to self-medication
and also the general right to decide what to put into one's
own body. Either you own yourself or you do not.
Gun laws have rendered millions of Americans defenseless; and
drug laws, as in the case of medical marijuana, have left thousands
of cancer, AIDS, and glaucoma patients helpless without the
medical benefits of their preferred treatment. The interference
with the right of people to choose their own medicines and means
of self-defense has been a tragic matter of life and death for
all too many peaceful Americans. The most fundamental argument
against drug laws and gun laws is moral: people have a right
to own themselves, defend themselves, possess property, and
control their own bodies. In practice, when this right is thwarted,
disaster ensues.
Because of the particular nature of possession crimes, the
similarities between gun control and the drug war do not end
there.
Creating spies and destroying civil liberties
Possession laws are very difficult to enforce in a free society.
Since no one's rights are being violated when someone owns a
banned gun or smokes marijuana, there is no victim to report
these "crimes" to the police and little natural incentive
for third parties to report their neighbors to the authorities.
Instead, the police have to actively search for the offenders,
an approach that predictably leads to the destruction of other
civil liberties, such as rights to privacy and freedom from
unreasonable search and seizure. Wiretaps, random searches and
roadblocks, and spying become common.
Since few people are naturally willing to turn in their neighbors
for victimless activity, the government has to create perverse
incentives for people to turn in lawbreakers. The drug war and
war on the Second Amendment have inspired the government to
pressure teachers and pediatricians to ask children about what
drugs or guns their parents might have. Drug and gun offenders
are also encouraged to testify against other offenders -- often-times
ones who committed much more minor offenses -- in exchange for
lowered prison sentences. This often leads to small-time offenders
getting longer sentences than the big-time dealers. Such government
programs to incite tattle-telling belong in history-book chapters
about the Soviet Union, but they have no place in a free society.
In addition, since victimless crime laws are difficult to enforce
with due process, the burden of evidence becomes horrifically
lowered. All that is needed is the presence of guns, drugs,
or money alleged to have been used in illegal transactions --
and, thanks to more recent changes in the laws, not even that.
Often only a testimonial from someone who was offered lenient
punishment by the prosecutor will do. So thousands of people
who didn't even commit the crime -- much less were proven guilty
beyond a reasonable doubt -- end up in prison. Restrictions
against entrapment and the planting of evidence become increasingly
eroded and ignored in a legal regime that prohibits peaceful
possession of contraband.
Since millions of Americans violate gun laws and drug laws,
and since it would be an economic and logistic impossibility
to catch and punish even most of them -- nor would most Americans
want to see them all punished, whereas most would probably want
to see all murderers punished -- the punishments against people
who break these laws end up being grossly unjust and disproportionate.
There are few crimes that have mandatory minimum punishments
designated by the federal government, drug and gun offenses
being the main ones. So we see drug offenders and gun offenders
receiving prison sentences of 5, 10, 20, or even 50 years; meanwhile
actual criminals who stole property or committed violence receive
relatively light sentences and are released early owing to prison
overcrowding. Federal prisoners convicted of violating drug
and firearms laws receive longer sentences, on average, than
criminals convicted of sexual abuse, assault, manslaughter,
burglary, or theft. This is a horrifying injustice, but it is
inevitable, once it is illegal to do something peaceful that
people want to do.
Black markets and violence
Of course, the drug war and gun control have led to huge black
markets in drugs and guns. With millions of potential customers,
people who enter the illegal businesses are people who are likely
to take risks and perhaps break laws in other ways. Without
the legal mechanisms of arbitration, disputes are often settled
with violence. The more money spent on enforcement, the more
lucrative and risky the business, and the more violence results.
Economists have estimated that the drug war increases homicides
by as much as 50 percent, and the Justice Department has estimated
that 2 million crimes are stopped every year by private gun
ownership. Few policies would cut down on crime more than ending
the drug war and repealing America's gun laws.
The violence caused by gun control and the drug war leads,
predictably, to more government spending, more draconian laws
and enforcement, and yet more crime and violence. The black-market
money also leads to incredible corruption in the police and
judicial systems. Bribes become commonplace, and in some places
the line between organized crime and the police departments
becomes dangerously blurred.
The massive amounts of money in black markets have also inspired
the advent of asset forfeiture -- an un-American, unconstitutional
assault on liberty and property rights whereby the government
can confiscate property that is suspected to be involved in
these "crimes," even if no one is formally accused.
(In 80 percent of the cases, no one is actually accused.) This
has led to more police corruption, with departments and even
individual law enforcers having a twisted incentive to confiscate
as much property as they can to line their coffers and pockets.
Asset forfeiture has mainly been rationalized as a gun-control
and drug-war measure, but it has become a monstrosity of its
own, leading to such atrocities as the killing of Don Scott,
a millionaire slain by L.A. County Sheriff's Department agents
who raided his Malibu home in the middle of the night, supposedly
looking for marijuana, suspiciously shortly after Scott refused
to sell his valuable land to the government. The Ventura County
D.A. concluded that the agents were motivated by the prospect
of using asset forfeiture to seize the land he refused to sell.
The vast black-market money in drugs and guns has also spawned
more victimless-crime laws against "money laundering."
In a free society, people would be free to do with their property
what they wish, so long as they don't commit violence. This
would include transferring it, or moving it out of the country.
This too has become heavily regulated by the government, thanks
mainly to the impossibility of succeeding in the wars against
guns and drugs.
The elevated crime associated with the black markets in guns
and drugs has, predictably, led to more laws against guns and
drugs. Instead of punishing the crimes themselves -- and, ideally,
ending the prohibitions that foster such crimes -- politicians
have focused on guns and drugs as if these inanimate objects
were the root causes of gang violence. Without the drug war
and its corresponding crime, the motivation for supporting gun
control would be much weaker. Without the drug war and its legacy
of attacks on the Bill of Rights, proposals to further attack
the Second Amendment would be without many of their most important
precedents.
Drug and gun prohibition
The relationship between drug prohibition and gun control goes
way back: the organized crime of Al Capone and the Mafia, which
flourished as a result of alcohol prohibition, was the inspiration
and rationale for the first major federal gun control, the National
Firearms Act of 1934. It is interesting to note that instead
of convicting Al Capone for either breaking laws against liquor
or the actual commission of violence, the government used tax
laws, and then proceeded to find ways to ban the firearms used
by organized crime. Instead of addressing the violence -- which
is hard to do when a vibrant prohibition-caused black market
corrupts the justice system and amplifies violent crime -- the
government created more crimes out of peaceful behavior, which
only made the problem worse, in the long run. Bad laws beget
more bad laws.
Three years after passing the National Firearms Act, the federal
government passed the most sweeping national drug law since
alcohol prohibition, the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937, followed
a year later by the Federal Firearms Act of 1938. Politicians
stretched the Commerce Clause of the Constitution to pass both
of these blatantly unconstitutional laws.
Particularly egregious are today's laws that connect guns and
drugs and punish people worse for possession of both than for
the sum of each. Even the otherwise legal possession of a gun
during the commission of a drug "crime" carries a
federal five-year mandatory minimum sentence. Sometimes, sentences
are doubled. And when drug offenders are released on parole
or probation, they are often stripped completely of their right
to keep and bear arms. This atrocious assault on the basic human
right of drug offenders released from prison has gotten precious
little attention, partly because many supporters of gun rights
are not sympathetic toward drug offenders, and many drug-war
reformers are all too apathetic about gun-ownership rights.
As long as gun-rights advocates don't see the direct threat
to all our civil and financial liberties that inevitably follow
from the drug war -- and as long as opponents of the drug war
fail to understand the evils that predictably come from a war
on guns -- Americans will continue to see their priceless liberties
steadily stripped away by both programs, in all their unconstitutionality
and immorality.
If proponents of civil liberties, on the other hand, become
more principled in their opposition to overbearing government
laws against possession -- or, more ideally, if they come to
embrace the moral rights of all individuals to own weapons to
protect their lives, families, and property and of all persons
to possess and ingest what they wish -- we can unite against
both kinds of oppression, and have a fighting chance of restoring
two of the most fundamental freedoms we have tragically lost
in this country over the last hundred years. And because of
the way these freedoms relate inextricably to so many others
that affect all Americans, and because of their connection to
violent crime, restoring the right to bear arms and ending the
drug war would result in one of the greatest revivals of liberty
and civility in the history of America.
"When the people find they can vote themselves
money, that will herald the end of the republic."
- Fall Of The Republic - Buy
the DVD here
|
INFOWARS:
BECAUSE THERE'S A WAR ON FOR YOUR MIND
|
|
