{"id":9,"date":"2002-05-26T06:05:00","date_gmt":"2002-05-26T11:05:00","guid":{"rendered":"\/?p=9"},"modified":"2002-05-26T06:05:00","modified_gmt":"2002-05-26T11:05:00","slug":"arm-and-assimilate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=9","title":{"rendered":"Arm and Assimilate"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A current Weekly Standard article, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.weeklystandard.com\/Content\/Public\/Articles\/000\/000\/001\/266umtwb.asp\"><br \/>\nCrime Without Punishment<\/a>, observes that European crime rates are<br \/>\nsoaring to levels that match or exceed the U.S.&#8217;s even while U.S crime<br \/>\nrates decline for the tenth consecutive year.  <em>Schadenfreude<\/em><br \/>\nis not a pretty emotion, but it&#8217;s hard not to feel a twinge of it<br \/>\nafter so many years of listening to snotty Europeans lecture us<br \/>\nAmericans on how U.S. crime rates demonstrate that we are a nation of<br \/>\nviolent barbarians who can be saved only if we swallow European social<br \/>\npolicies entire.<\/p>\n<p>The article proposes as an explanation that local control of<br \/>\npolicing is more effective than Europe&#8217;s system of large centralized<br \/>\npolice agencies.  This may well be true; in fact, it probably is true.<br \/>\nBut it fails to explain the time variance &#8212; because that structural<br \/>\ndifference is not new, but the flipover in relative crime rates<br \/>\nbetween the U.S. and Europe is recent.<\/p>\n<p>If that&#8217;s not what is going on, what is?  The article passes over<br \/>\ntwo potential explanations far too quickly.  One: differences in<br \/>\npatterns of civilian firearms ownership. Two: the novel presence of<br \/>\nlarge unassimilated minority groups in European cities.<\/p>\n<p>The article correctly notes that &#8220;John Lott has shown that greater<br \/>\ngun ownership reduces crime&#8221; but then dismisses this with &#8220;gun<br \/>\nownership levels are about the same as they were when crime hit its<br \/>\nall-time highs in America 30 years ago&#8221;.  However, the<br \/>\n<em>distribution<\/em> of firearms has changed in relevant ways.  As<br \/>\nGary Kleck noted ten years ago, the composition of the U.S. firearms<br \/>\nstock in the early 1970s was dominated by rifles and shotguns.<br \/>\nNowadays it is dominated by pistols.  Americans, aided by a recent<br \/>\nstate-level trend towards right-to-carry laws, are packing concealed<br \/>\nweapons on the street in greater numbers than ever before &#8212; and those<br \/>\nare the weapons known to have the most dramatic effect in suppressing<br \/>\ncrime.  Indeed, one of the principal results of Lott&#8217;s regression<br \/>\nanalysis is that encouraging civilians to carry concealed is both a<br \/>\ncheaper and a more effective way to deter crime than increasing police<br \/>\nbudgets.<\/p>\n<p>The article dismisses immigration with &#8220;violence and theft have<br \/>\nalso spiked in countries that let in few immigrants&#8221;.  Again, there is<br \/>\nan issue of distribution here.  American experience tells us that it<br \/>\nis not the absolute number of unassimilated poor that matters, but the<br \/>\nextent to which they are concentrated in subsidized ghettos with<br \/>\nlittle contact with the mainstream and no incentive to assimilate.<br \/>\nAfter the repeated news stories observing that skyrocketing crime in Paris<br \/>\nis largely a phenomenon of Arab thug-boys from bleak government-run<br \/>\nhousing projects, this should not be a difficult concept to grasp.<\/p>\n<p>What&#8217;s new in Europe is not comparatively poor policing, but rather<br \/>\nthe combination of two trends: laws disarming civilians and the<br \/>\nformation of persistent, crime-breeding ghetto cultures analogous to<br \/>\nthe U.S.&#8217;s urban underclass.  Both trends are clearest in Great<br \/>\nBritain, where violent assaults and hot burglaries have shot up 44%<br \/>\nsince handguns were banned in 1996, and police now find they have to<br \/>\ngo armed to counter gangs of automatic-weapon-wielding thugs in the<br \/>\nslum areas of Manchester and other big cities.<\/p>\n<p>The prescription seems clear: arm and assimilate.  Arm the victims<br \/>\nbefore they become victims and assimilate the criminals before they<br \/>\nbecome criminals.  Raising the frequency of civilian concealed carry<br \/>\nof firearms will deter crime, just as it does in the U.S.<br \/>\nAssimilating the new wave of poor Third-World immigrants and breaking<br \/>\nup the ghettos will drain the stagnant pools in which crime<br \/>\nbreeds.<\/p>\n<p>And the next Euro-snob to lecture me on how America&#8217;s &#8220;gun culture&#8221;<br \/>\ncauses crime is going to get both barrels of this prescription right<br \/>\nin his face&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>UPDATE: The Boston Globe is running a story on the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.boston.com\/dailyglobe2\/146\/focus\/Targeting_a_myth+.shtml\">failure<br \/>\nof gun control in Great Britain<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>UPDATE: A reader points out that I was inexplicit about what has<br \/>\nled to the formation of a ghettoized underclass in Europe&#8217;s cities.<br \/>\nIt is, of course, the same blunder that started the same process in<br \/>\nAmerican cities forty years ago &#8212; the social-welfare state,<br \/>\nsubsidizing poverty.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/enetation.co.uk\/comments.php?user=esr&amp;commentid=76987892\">Blogspot Comments<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A current Weekly Standard article, Crime Without Punishment, observes that European crime rates are soaring to levels that match or exceed the U.S.&#8217;s even while U.S crime rates decline for the tenth consecutive year. Schadenfreude is not a pretty emotion, but it&#8217;s hard not to feel a twinge of it after so many years of&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=9\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Arm and Assimilate<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-firearms","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}