Conservatives are generally good at arguing against gun control. Besides the
constitutional case — that the Second Amendment protects an individual
right keep and bear arms — they are also well versed in the “pragmatic”
arguments.
For example, they say that gun laws will not be respected by people intent
on committing crimes of violence because it is unlikely that a person who
has no moral scruples against committing murder, assault, or robbery would
shrink at running afoul of mere gun laws.
The 20,000 firearms restrictions now on the books have not prevented gun
violence, including horrific shootings by teenagers. On the contrary: to the
extent that gun laws impede law-abiding citizens from obtaining and carrying
firearms, those laws encourage gun violence.
Conservatives also justifiably raise the specter of the black market when
gun controllers propose making it tougher, if not impossible, to buy guns
legally. With at least 65 million handguns in private hands currently,
black-market thugs would have no difficulty finding a supply.
Moreover, an essentially open society with long borders and coastlines could
not prevent the smuggling of firearms. Guns also can be made in clandestine
domestic factories if necessary. If the demand is there the supply will
follow. Since guns are the tools of the criminal trade, the demand will be
there.
Gun restrictions (or prohibition) combined with the black market in guns for
outlaws result in the endangerment of law-abiding citizens, who are rendered
defenseless by law in the face of well-armed criminals. Thus gun control not
only is futile; it also makes things many times worse.
The corollary is that gun ownership by law-abiding people makes things
better. That is the upshot of the work of John Lott, who has shown that
states which recognize a citizen’s right to carry concealed handguns have
seen their crime rates go down.
Conservatives understand all this — which makes it puzzling that they favor
laws against the manufacture, sale, and use of narcotics and other illegal
drugs. If the connection between the two is not obvious, read on.
The pragmatic arguments against gun control and drug control are similar.
Not much argument is required to show the futility of drug control. The war
on drugs has been fought for decades. Yet today drugs are more plentiful,
more potent, and cheaper than ever. New drugs are developed all the time.
The authorities can’t keep drugs out of prisons — which fact alone should
end all argument.
What we observe in the illegal gun trade we also observe in the illegal drug
trade: when human beings demand something, entrepreneurial ingenuity is
summoned forth to satisfy that demand and to reap profits that reflect the
risk.
No matter what the drug warriors do, the flow of drugs continues essentially
unabated. When the heat gets too great on one foreign or domestic source,
another emerges to take its place. Regardless of what one thinks of the
product, the market for drugs works just as it does for other goods and
services. Attempts to rid society of drugs are hopeless.
There is one key difference between a legal and an illegal market. In the
latter a premium is placed on skill at employing violence. In a black
market, normal security and dispute-resolution procedures are unavailable.
So “justice” is procured more directly. This offers an advantage to people
proficient in the use of physical force. The drug trade is violent not
because of drugs, but because of the war against drugs. If drugs are
outlawed, only outlaws will sell drugs. And outlaws tend to be not only
skilled but also uninhibited in the use of force.
Why don’t most conservatives apply the same logic to drugs that they use for
guns? It can’t be because there is no amendment in the U.S. Constitution
that specifies a right to ingest the substance of one’s choice. For one
thing, there is an impeccable constitutional case against national drug
prohibition, one which an older generation of conservatives understood
better. That case begins by noting that, as the Constitution is constructed,
the federal government may exercise only the powers expressly delegated in
Article I, Section 8.
If the Constitution is silent on a matter, that matter is left to the states
or to the people, according to the Tenth Amendment. One does not look first
at the Bill of Rights to determine whether individuals should be free from
federal restraint. One looks at the enumerated powers. If a claimed power is
not there, the feds are sidelined.
Is Congress given the power to forbid the sale and ingestion of drugs? No
one has been able to point to the relevant clause. Some might invoke the
General Welfare and Commerce Clauses, but conservatives have been properly
wary of how the “living Constitution” crowd has stretched those clauses
beyond recognition. Besides, neither clause would support a war on drugs.
As Madison said, making the General Welfare Clause into a grant of plenary
power would fly in the face of enumerated powers and thus transmogrify the
Constitution into something it was never meant to be.
And the Commerce Clause was intended merely to create a free-trade zone in
the United States. The Left has used that clause to smuggle all kinds of
illicit powers into the central government’s hands, including gun,
anti-discrimination, and sexual-violence laws. The Right would use it for
its own pet projects.
When the idea of alcohol prohibition got up enough steam to prevail, its
proponents obtained a constitutional amendment, conceding that the
Constitution did not empower the central government to outlaw consumer
products. Why is no amendment thought necessary for drug prohibition? Are we
all “living constitution” advocates now?
If conservatives don’t have a constitutional case for drug prohibition, they
may think they have a cultural case. In their view, drugs are part of a
left-wing package deal they want no part of.
While some anti-war student activists in the 1960s celebrated drug use (hard
Left elements opposed legalization), the conservative view is an association
by nonessentials. Drug use has nothing to do with ideology.
Moreover, the issue is really not drug use, but government power. To defend
the freedom to use drugs is not to advocate the use of drugs. Conservatives
seem to understand that for tobacco. Why the lapse when it comes to drugs?
They may respond that someone who wrecks his life using drugs harms not only
himself but his family and others. But that is also true of someone who
wrecks his life with alcohol or gambling.
Yet most conservatives do not seek a new prohibition of alcohol or gambling.
Not everyone who uses, say, marijuana, wrecks his life or hurts other
people. By what right does the state intervene before an actual crime of
force is committed?
Guns can harm innocent people, but conservatives properly demand that
government not interfere with any gun owner unless he has actually committed
a crime.
Conservatives apparently see no great harm in the drug war. Leave aside the
little matter of official corruption and its corrosive effect on the rule of
law. Forget its routine assault on our right to be secure in our homes.
(Pre-dawn raids by militarized law-enforcement officers did not begin with
Elián Gonzalez.) Never mind the violations of our financial privacy to
combat the drug kingpins’ money laundering.
We may also ignore the foreign intervention the U.S. government commits in
combating the drug trade; it has escalated its participation in the
decades-long civil war in Colombia in the name of stopping drugs at their
source. (“Colombia is the heart of the drug war, and we’d better get on with
it,” said the late Republican Sen. Paul Coverdell of Georgia. “If we lose in
Colombia, then we lose everywhere.” Where have we heard that before?)
The conservatives are wrong. The war on drugs wreaks great harm on us. And
among those harms is the war on guns. Guns are integral to the black market
in drugs, overshadowing the common, but largely unseen, use of guns to
defend innocent life.
According to a 1998 Canadian Department of Justice study, which examined the
literature on the connection between drugs and guns in the United States and
elsewhere, “There is clear and substantial evidence that firearms are an
essential tool for regulating the illegal trade in drugs, including
protecting shipments of drugs, enforcing debts, resolving disputes,
eliminating competition, killing or injuring informants and defending
against enforcement personnel.”
The study pointed out that since drug dealers can’t call the police and tend
to avoid banks and other legitimate security measures, they are tempting
targets for thieves. They compensate by being heavily armed.
The study quoted Steven Duke and Albert Gross’s book America’s Longest War:
“As drug proceeds mushroomed during the seventies and early eighties,
midlevel drug distributors were able to buy not only rifles and handguns,
but automatic weapons, bazookas, grenades, even rockets.... To counteract
such offensive and defensive power, other more powerful weaponry is
marketed, and so on up the spiral. Virtually everyone who deals in drugs or
drug money has at least a handgun. Stash houses and laboratories are
arsenals”
Drug-law critic Ethan Nadelmann is also quoted:
“Most law enforcement officials agree that the dramatic increases in urban
murder rates during the past few years can be explained almost entirely by
the rise in drug-related killings.”
In the last several years the anti-gun movement has gotten a boost from the
specter of well-armed youth gangs fighting with each other and police and
committing drive-by shootings. Those gangs are deeply involved in the drug
trade, and their black-market revenues have financed massive arsenals that
rival those of the local police.
Guns are the gangs’ means of resolving disputes between competitors and
between buyers and sellers. “Gang activity and violence, which have
increased greatly over the past decade, have been directly associated with
drug sales,” wrote Barry Stimmel in 1996 (quoted in the Canadian study).
This is the source of the alarm about guns and “children,” in which category
the gun controllers misleadingly include adolescents and young adults up to
19 years old.
According to the National Center for Health Statistics, in 1997, 85 percent
of the 4,200 intentional (including suicide) and accidental gun deaths of
“children” actually involved victims 15 to 19 years old, many of whom were
inner-city gang members.
The U.S. Justice Departments acknowledges that the problem of gun violence
and youth is mostly an inner-city problem, which means a black-market drug
phenomenon (“Promising Strategies to Reduce Gun Violence,” Department of
Justice monograph, February 1999).
Violent resolution of drug disputes can also set a tone for the wider
community where affluent gang members with fancy cars and flashy firearms
are objects of admiration and role models for fatherless boys.
The willingness to use a gun to settle scores and gain respect can become
part of a subculture’s way of life. The six-year-old boy who shot a
schoolmate to death with a stolen handgun lived in his uncle’s crack house.
There is no question that drug-related gun violence has scared people. Some
have armed themselves in self-defense, although government has made this
more difficult.
But many others — after being bombarded with countless images of criminal
gun use on television and no images of the defensive use of guns — have
been softened up for the anti-gun movement’s demagogic appeals.
Well-meaning or not, anti-gun activists, rather than rethinking the drug
war, have instead offered this simple-minded palliative: end gun violence by
passing more laws against gun possession.
The advice is ironic: if the laws against drug trading and possession have
not made drugs disappear, why should we expect gun laws to make guns
disappear?
The greater irony is that to the extent that conservatives have encouraged
the government in the war on drugs, they have unwittingly helped advance the
war on guns. Their enthusiasm for anti-drug laws contributes to the
conditions that make some people eager to accept anti-gun laws.
Decriminalizing the use of and trade in drugs would take the drug industry
away from the most violent elements of society and place them in the open
marketplace, where civil dispute resolution would replace gunfights. It
would also deprive thugs of a superlucrative occupation.
That combination would be a blow to the anti-gun lobby. The absence of
routine gun violence by reviled drug sellers would deprive the lobby of some
of its most potent propaganda. Then Second Amendment champions could begin
to rehabilitate firearms as a reasonable tool self-defense.
