--- James Heartfield <Jim at heartfield.demon.co.uk>
wrote: > >
>
> In his book Militarism and Anti-Militarism, Karl
> Liebknicht made the
> case for the legalisation of firearms as a
> democratic demand. If the
> people are armed then the state has lost its
> monopoly on the means of
> force.
Oligopoly in the use of force doesn't sound much better and indeed, the example of somewhere like Belfast shows that it isn't. Force is a bad, not a good, so it's probably a good thing that its production is monopolised.
> All the same, I find it hard to believe that you
> could argue for a
> disarming of the populace without reinforcing their
> dependence upon the
> state.
Well, fer a start, the Weber quote is often also given as "monopoly on the *legitimate* use of force". As such, it's only particularly relevant when legitimised force is the only kind in use. An effective disarming of the populace in Belfast in 1988 would very certainly have reduced their dependency on the state; they wouldn't have needed troops on the streets to avoid being burned alive. And they would have had considerably more freedom to decide exactly what kind of a Catholic or Protestant they wanted to be.
See, this is my problem with this whole strand of analysis, and it's a problem shared by a lot of neoclassical economics. The underlying assumption is that people are atomic while government is monolithic.
The idea is that as soon as the monopoly is removed, we will have armed individuals (or in otheer cases, perfect competition). In fact what tends to happen is that companies form cartels, and, in the right circumstances, armed people form into armed *groups* of people and start forcing other (armed or unarmed) individuals to do things their way.
Individual weapons as a defence against tyranny is a good solution if your threat model is the American Colonies versus an easily identifiable, external oppressor. For most of the actually existing tyrannies of the 20th century, where the threat model is almost always an armed popular movement, it doesn't look so good.
In general, I think people should be allowed to have guns, because in general, people should be allowed to have things. But treating it as a political panacea looks dodgy to me.
d^2
> --
> James Heartfield
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