Monday, October 17, 2011

How the Occupy Movement Has Made Me Support Gun Rights


Becoming a libertarian is a process, not an overnight change.  One does not become persuaded by the economic arguments of Milton Friedman and then immediately demand an end to the War on Drugs.  The libertarian perspective is consistent across a broad range of issues, but individuals who encounter the libertarian worldview and adopt it do not do so all at once.  

Although I have considered myself a libertarian for some time now, it was only recently that I became persuaded of the need to protect the right of citizens to bear arms.  While I could understand why having the right to conduct ones economic affairs freely is important, as is the freedom to travel abroad or express oneself without restriction, I did not consider the ability to own and carry a deadly weapon to be an important personal freedom.

I knew that some people felt very strongly about gun rights, but it just didn’t strike me as something that we needed to protect in the 21st century.  When someone would appeal to the need for an armed citizenry to act as a check against government power, I would simply laugh and shrug it off as a distant and mythical threat.  When someone would appeal to the second amendment, I would point to the language in the amendment that ties the right to bear arms to participation in a militia. 

That was until I saw the occupy protests.  The NYPD has behaved so despicably towards the protestors that it makes my stomach turn.  We have seen bystanders intentionally ran over by police on motorcycles.  We have seen peaceful protestors thrown to the ground and handcuffed.  We have seen people pepper-sprayed without justification.  We have seen people arrested for no reason whatsoever and charged with crimes as vague and subjective as “disturbing the peace.” 

Two years ago, an analogous movement to the occupy protests popped up just as spontaneously.  The Tea Party was in many ways similar to the occupy movement.  People sick of the status quo in politics wanted to go out and make their voices heard, and they used peaceful demonstrations to do it. 

But, to my knowledge, there was no police brutality at any of the Tea Party rallies.  Not once was a Tea Partier thrown to the ground and handcuffed arbitrarily.  Why not? 

It certainly could not have been the message.  The Tea Party was out to protest the immense power that government had taken for itself in the wake of the financial crisis.  The occupiers, with the exception of a libertarian minority, are out to expand the influence and control that government has over the American people.  Surely jack-booted thugs like those in the NYPD would approve more of the latter message than the former. 

It could not have been the public perception of the protests.  The media has portrayed Occupy Wall Street as a legitimate expression of public outrage at things like perceived inequality and the misdeeds of bankers and big corporations.  Two years ago, it portrayed the Tea Party as either an “Astroturf” protest movement—paid for by the villainous Koch brothers, of course—or a resurgence of racism in the wake of America’s first black president.  As a result, the occupy movement enjoys a public approval rating twice as high as the Tea Party.

I am convinced that there is only one factor that prevented the Tea Party from falling victim to the same brutal police tactics that the occupy movement has—the presence of guns at the protests. 

Right from its early days, Tea Partiers were known for showing up to protests with weapons in plain sight.  Pistols were strapped to legs and assault rifles were slung over shoulders.  This caused a media panic and MSNBC anchors spoke about violence breaking out at the protests with a sense of inevitability. 

But not one malicious shot was ever fired from any of these weapons at a Tea Party event.  No accidents happened, no confrontations got out of hand, and no inevitable assassination ever took place. 

The guns, just as gun rights advocates have always claimed they do, kept the peace.  No police officers got out of hand and started man-handling innocent protestors because they knew that a confrontation with this group was to be avoided—they could fight back.  The opposite is true of the occupiers. 

And so, as I said before, this recent bout of police violence in New York has opened my eyes to the need for an armed public.  If only the occupiers had been an armed group like the Tea Party, the brutality and thuggery we are witnessing now might never have happened.    

9 comments:

  1. hi Ben

    This is a follow up post to the comments I made on FB. Pls pardon the brevity - not intended to be rude or curt, just rushing right now and only have a few points anyway.

    So, I mentioned my concern that this post reflects potential for confounding errors and/or confirmation bias. Of course this can be said of almost any non-scientific study (e.g. intuition, such as your post), but that notwithstanding, the point that is central to your argument (which you put in bold, appropriately) is the following:

    'I am convinced that there is only one factor that prevented the Tea Party from falling victim to the same brutal police tactics that the occupy movement has—the presence of guns at the protests. "

    Now, I recognize that you have argued well about your position (or observations) about this, and that there is indeed a chance that you could be right. however, it's the word "convinced" that I think is inappropriate. I'll play Socrates here, again in part in essence of time.

    1. Can you think of any other conceivable factors in why this differs from the Tea Party protests that you might have missed?

    2. Is comparison to one, i.e. single, other event enough to draw such a conclusion as you have?

    3. In your final sentence, you use the words "might not have happened." How does that conclusively support gun rights?

    4. What other ways might have prevented the "thuggery"?

    Hope this helps in your consideration.

    David

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  2. btw, here is a different angle also worth mentioning: assuming you are correct that the presence of guns indeed was the one-and-only reason the Tea Party did not suffer the same fate as the Occupy movement, this still ignores another important consideration -- is there a potential for much greater violence (I'm speaking of the unnecessary variety) when guns are present?

    The point here would be something like this: let's say 1 in five times guns prevent the thuggery, but 1 in 7 times the presence of guns causes 50 times the number of injuries/deaths. What policy would be preferred?

    From a policy standpoint, I think that is debatable.

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  3. Hey David,

    I didn’t see too much in the way of substantive objection in your response, perhaps just an objection to the tone of certainty with which I wrote the post. That’s sort of a stylistic decision on my end, and something I may experiment with changing as I blog more. I don’t know that you could say I had a confirmation bias on this issue, though, because, as the title of the post says, the occupy protests were actually what made me change my mind about the gun rights issue. When someone has a confirmation bias, they are usually looking for reasoning that supports their existing position, not forces them to change it (hence the word “confirmation”.)

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  4. In response to your four questions:

    1. Can you think of any other conceivable factors in why this differs from the Tea Party protests that you might have missed?

    No, I can't. In the post, I offered two potential explanations and refuted them. If you can suggest another possible reason, I will consider it.

    2. Is comparison to one, i.e. single, other event enough to draw such a conclusion as you have?11

    Yes. I think the two movements are so similar in so many ways that it gives us as close to a laboratory-style controlled experiment as one can expect in the real world.

    If you'd like other examples of how police tend to behave at unarmed protests, we can look at the Arab Spring as well as recent protests in Greece and Great Britain.

    I'm not aware of any major peaceful, armed protests analogous to the Tea Party movement in recent times.

    3. In your final sentence, you use the words "might not have happened." How does that conclusively support gun rights?

    It shows that gun rights are important not only for their own sake but also to support your right to freedom of speech and free assembly.

    4. What other ways might have prevented the "thuggery"?

    I don't know of any, but, again, if you have suggestions I'd be happy to consider them.

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  5. “Assuming you are correct that the presence of guns indeed was the one-and-only reason the Tea Party did not suffer the same fate as the Occupy movement, this still ignores another important consideration -- is there a potential for much greater violence (I'm speaking of the unnecessary variety) when guns are present?

    The point here would be something like this: let's say 1 in five times guns prevent the thuggery, but 1 in 7 times the presence of guns causes 50 times the number of injuries/deaths. What policy would be preferred?”

    Actually, we can answer this empirically. The question of the impact of guns on violence is one of the most highly studied in sociology and behavioral economics, and consistently it has been shown that gun violence is reduced when more people carry weapons.* This makes a lot of sense when you frame within from the axiom “people respond to incentives.” When gun ownership is high, there is a stronger disincentive to start violent confrontations and a stronger incentive to diffuse potentially violent situations.

    These incentives would hold true for police officers dealing with protestors as well as people dealing with one another in general, so it makes sense that armed protests will generally be more peaceful.

    But even if there were ever armed protests that turned violent, and the injuries and deaths at violent armed protests were equivalent to the injuries and deaths at violent unarmed protests, the violent armed protests would still be preferable, since we can assume that a greater amount of the injuries and deaths would be amongst the police in the armed protests than they would be in the unarmed protests.

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  6. *A few of the empirical studies supporting the inverse correlation between gun ownership and crime rates:

    Bruce L. Benson, Florida State University, and Brent D. Mast, American Enterprise Institute, 'Privately Produced General Deterrence', The Journal of Law and Economics, October 2001

    Florenz Plassmann, State University of New York at Binghamton, and T. Nicolaus Tideman, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, "Does the right to carry concealed handguns deter countable crimes? Only a count analysis can say", The Journal of Law and Economics, October 2001

    Carlisle E. Moody, College of William and Mary, "Testing for the effects of concealed weapons laws: Specification errors and robustness," The Journal of Law and Economics, October 2001.

    William Alan Bartley and Mark A. Cohen, Vanderbilt University, 'The Effect of Concealed Weapons Laws: An Extreme Bound Analysis', Economic Inquiry, 1998.
    Florenz Plassmann, State University of New York at Binghamton, and John Whitley, University of Adelaide, 'Confirming "More Guns, Less Crime"', Stanford Law Review, 2003.

    Eric Helland, Claremont-McKenna College and Alexander Tabarrok, George Mason University, "Using Placebo Laws to Test 'More Guns, Less Crime'," The B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy, 2008.

    Carlisle E. Moody, College of William and Mary, and Thomas B. Marvell, Justec Research, 'The Debate on Shall-Issue Laws', Econ Journal Watch, 2008.

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  7. did my comments from last night not post? if so, ARGGHHH!!! I can't even remember what I wrote :(

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  8. Hi Ben

    Well, very little sucks more than having to retype a post (most of which I've forgotten since last night), but here was, I think, the gist of it:

    - Good comments, as usual.

    - Agree: my comments not really substantive, nor intended to be. I'm questioning your methodology.

    - Prejudice and observer bias aren't really the same thing. You can, and I suspect do, have observer bias gained by sudden, strong impressions (or conclusions) made on anecdotal evidence (hence the title of your post, and much of the content).

    - Overall this seems like a good start for a hypothesis, but too unscientific and anecdotal to be any basis for conclusions.

    - Food for thought: how did the police know that there were no guns at #occupy? I suspect they did not (and I suspect there ARE guns there), and hence your thesis would be undermined either entirely or to a significant extent.

    - Happy to chat with you about this. I'm learning some interesting stuff (I know VERY little about this, hence lack of any effort to be substantive).

    - Also glad if I'm any impetus for style and/or approach on your blog posts.

    All the best,

    David

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  9. ps - like you, I'm a natural contrarian ;)

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