Bonus Quote of the Day: On Prohibition of Guns and Muslims: Policymaking is Easy, If It Ignores Reality

George Friedman of Stratfor, a global Intelligence outfit, has an excellent treatise on prohibition laws (applied to guns and Muslims) in his article "Beyond the Current Fantasies in the Jihadist War" published at the Mauldin Economics website

Here is an excerpt

Last week, I wrote an article on the massacre in Florida. It drew many responses and some criticisms. In general, the critics fell into two groups.

Some felt I should have demanded stricter gun control. Others, that I should have demanded an end to all immigration by Muslims. On the surface, both suggestions are reasonable, but they reminded me of something Will Rogers said.

Rogers was a renowned American humorist in the early 20th century. During World War I, German U-boats threatened the Allied war effort by sinking US ships headed to Europe. The Allied navies could not stop the slaughter.

Rogers was asked what he would do about it. He said that the only solution was to boil away the Atlantic Ocean, and then capture the U-boats sitting on the bottom. When asked how to do that, Rogers answered that he was responding as a policymaker, and that that question must be handled by others.

There was genius in this answer. Boiling away the Atlantic would have solved the U-boat problem. Any issues created by the solution would have been ignored. Whether or not it could be done was treated as someone else’s problem.

Policymaking is easy, if it ignores reality. And the problem we have is not only that policymakers craft policies designed to fail, but that citizens in a democracy do the same. The desire to do something is overwhelming. The solution is derived from interests and not connected with the reality of the problem. The result is that nothing is done.

So, those concerned with gun violence want to deal with terrorism through gun control. Those who see immigration as the problem want to solve it with immigration control. Both have decided to boil away the Atlantic Ocean. They move on, and nothing is done.

Why Banning Guns Won’t Work

The gun group argues that if there were no guns, there would be no gun deaths. Therefore, banning guns, or at least assault weapons, is essential. They might add that homemade explosives—like those used in the Boston Marathon attack—should also be banned, but that has been left out of the debate.

The Congressional Research Service says there are 300 million guns in the US. I have no idea how they came up with this number, but we can agree there are a lot. One study estimated there were 1.5 million assault weapons in the US.

Let’s assume a law banning the sale of assault weapons was passed. That would stop the number of these weapons from rising. But unless the 1.5 million assault rifles already owned were seized, their value would soar and spawn a robust black market.

Of course, an endless stream of AK-47s—cheap and effective assault rifles—would be smuggled into the US.

The US has banned the sale of heroin for nearly a century. Vast amounts have been spent on the drug war, yet the flow of heroin has never been stopped—even before the rise of Mexican drug cartels.

When something is cheap on one side of the border and expensive on the other side, there will be people willing to smuggle it.

Heroin users in the US will pay a lot of money to get it. The same is true for those who want assault rifles—particularly criminals and terrorists.

You can pass any law you wish. It won’t be effective. Even during World War II in occupied Europe where the price for owning a gun was death, people still had guns they used to attack the Germans.

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