To the aficionado of quotations, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different outcome. This remark, whose origin is murky, but was not coined by Einstein, could be seen as a bit of counterpoint to David Hume’s causal skepticism by saying that if conditions and actions remain the same, the effects are indeed linked and should not be surprising.
As a rule of thumb, this is not bad guidance. The Earth might not turn sufficiently to reveal the Sun to us in the morning, but betting people, astronomers, and politicians are right to lay aside any doubt.
Very well, then, how do we arrive at such sound anticipations of act leading to consequence?
Each field will have its own particular rules, but what is known as the scientific method offers a good general technique—especially if we use the expansive original definition of science as knowing. The scientific method, which could be called just as well the rational procedure, involves gathering data relevant to the question under consideration, looking for patterns—correlation does not imply, but it often suggests causation—and testing the conclusions that we draw, while offering predictions about the outcomes of future tests. This is an iterative—dare I say, a dialectical—process, with all theories—i.e., the conclusions of one productive round of that method—being subject to future cycles.
As I suggested, this need not be limited to what in the departmental listings of a modern university are called the sciences. If I really want my cat to stop circling from side table to floor to desk to side table around me, I can try new methods other than patting her tail and saying, “Scoot!” If something electrical has failed in my car, I can read the work of previous automobile theorists and do some testing in the fuse panel—or I can try to honk the horn, as Robert Pirsig asserted as a good early step in such matters, as least with regard to motorcycles. If I believe that Shakespeare was secretly a Catholic, I can look through the meager records that we have of his life or search for new documents, and I can examine passages in his writings that appear to deal with matters of theology.
There are two problems here if we are operating in the area of public policy.
The first is that experimenting on human beings comes with a host of difficulties. Playing with the laws to see what might happen is ethically dubious, and the causes and effects of human acts are often a tangle of chains. When the United States intervened in the various wars in the former Yugoslavia during the 1990s, it was possible to argue that doing so made sense, given the fact that World Wars One and Two arose in part out of similar circumstances around the turn of the previous century, and many a conflict since 1945 has been justified by pointing at Neville Chamberlain’s attempt to appease Hitler, but drawing precise parallels is tough to do, and since events move on and on through time, we cannot easily go back to the point of our current decision making and try something else to see how things might turn out another way.
The other problem is one of category, rather than of detail. A politician might suggest, say, that terrorism could be solved or at least greatly reduced by opening all communications—telephone, e-mail, whatnot—to the inspection of the government’s security agencies, and this would indeed appear to be a practical proposal, one that in the American case has been attempted and that as artificial intelligence becomes more sophisticated would require fewer and fewer human employees. But what, then, about a right to privacy?
To assert the existence of human rights is to pull whatever process we are engaged in out of the logic of the scientific method—or to put this in a better way, rights introduce a new term into the calculations, a set of constants that must be taken into account, at least if we agree to share this particular value.
I discuss all of this as a preparation to ask at what point might we reach the last gun control law. Which is to say, after how many new restrictions, regulations, and requirements would a gun control advocate say that we have gone as far as we may go?
The recent back and forth over the constitutionality of California’s bans on so-called assault weapons and large-capacity magazines comes after over a century and a half of gun laws ratcheting every tighter, while the state’s rate of violent crime rose and fell in step with national and global trends since the 1960s. Gun laws in Britain show a similar pattern over the same period, going from almost none under the 1689 Bill of Rights to a license requirement for carry to ever more onerous restrictions that have arrived at comprehensive bans of many classes of firearms and prohibitions on any carry, and yet the homicide rate in specifically in England and Wales has fluctuated between 0.8 to 1.6 per hundred thousand since the late 1700s, with a rise to a relative high in recent years. Examples such as these, the darlings of the gun control movement, make me ask at what point the repeated increases in the burdens on the law-abiding could be seen as sufficient.
Advocates of control will tell me and have told me that California and England enjoy lower rates of gun deaths as a result of their laws, and yet the data show that homicides in general have no linkage to the severity of gun regulations, the rates again moving up and down irrespective of the legal controls. To say that their low rates are due to their laws is to invite comparisons with Maine and New Hampshire or with the Czech Republic, all of which have had lower rates than what the supposed gun control paradises experienced this century.
This is one reason why I say—whenever asked and at other times—that gun control is not the solution to violence. Various jurisdictions add more and more restrictions, only to see little to no improvement in murders and similar crimes, only to add more restrictions, and round and round.
Whatever the origin of the definition given at the start of this article, we are seeing here an insane policy choice on the part of gun control advocates who hope that if we add just this limit or that ban, something will change. What we need is an approach that respects both basic rights and provides evidence of having worked.
Much of the logic behind hardware bans/restrictions rests on the strange assumption that criminals, who by definition are indifferent to the law, will obey gun laws.