Judith Collins's legacy: image over reality.

A career summarised: no ideas, no direction, no success -- and not one car crushed

What does a career in politics achieve? 

This afternoon Judith Collins will give her valedictory speech in Parliament. Journalists call her career "colourful." They call her "Crusher." Let's review what she's done there over the years.

• she was one of 23 MPs who rented their home to themselves at taxpayers' expense
• she was always ready to give the trough a decent nudge -- costing us in 2023 more than $24,200, made up of more than $6000 for accommodation and just over $18,000 on travel (a massive saving for us from 2009 when her limos and international travel were costing us nearly $200,000)
• need we mention using her position to help the export business for which her husband was a director?
• brought down for the first time (of many) by her own Entitle-itis, one wag suggested 'Trougher' Collins would be a better nick than 'Crusher'
• as Police Minister she continued to ensure that gangs could make decent profits on illegal drugs, while also ensuring police focus more on revenue-gathering than resolving real crimes (cementing an image as tough but crushingly ignorant)
• as the #DirtyPolitics saga did reveal, she maintained a disinterest in ideas, and a consequent obsession with scandals and (ineffective) dirty tricks
• and as Police Minister (her only real job) what did she actually do beyond asset confiscation; suspension of your right to silence; and expanded search and surveillance powers for an extraordinary range of government departments? 
• apart from, of course, bringing in pathetic new laws to "crush" cars instead of simply applying laws already on the books -- the main goal of which "seems to be the generation of positive media coverage for Judith Collins"
• as opposition MP in 2007 she stood up on the steps of Parliament to swear total opposition to the anti-smacking amendment; and then one month later filed obediently into the lobbies to vote for it
• in any competition between real action or spin, it was almost always spin she favoured -- even if it made us less safe
• as Opposition MP in 2005 and desperate to be noticed, she did point out that the Labour Government's Working for Families package is an election bribe paid being paid for with voters' own money -- and then as government MP and minister continued to administer the bribe
• keeping alive the tradition of promising and reneging, Collins was happy to be photographed firing a pistol to court the gun lobby (posting one on her own Facebook page in case you missed it); before  being the only National MP to support banning semi-automatic weapons for civilian purposes, and to boast about it
• as Corrections Minister she drove the reintroduction of private prisons -- for the actual privatisation of force, an unconscionable mixing of the dollar and the gun, with all the temptation to corruption and abuse that goes with it
• as Opposition Leader, Collins did promise the National Party would reverse any attempts by the Ardern government to criminalise speech beyond the threshold of "inciting violence," and warned against ending up with "UK-style hate speech legislation that has ended up with people being criminalised and even imprisoned for foolish and silly comments." All good, except that as (In)Justice Minister she had already drawn up much the same thing under her Harmful Digital Communications Act which hit us in 2015
• as Police Minister in 2016 she did correctly observe that the primary welfare problem to solve is not a poverty of money, the premise behind Labour's Working for Families programme, but "a poverty of ideas, a poverty of parental responsibility, a poverty of love, a poverty of caring. ... it is not just a lack of money, it is primarily a lack of responsibility." And then sat back as her Government and Party kept the policy, and did nothing to arrest the real poverty she'd identified
• And just to be clear: 'Crusher Collins never even crushed one car. Not one. (Only three cars in total were crushed under her legislation, all of which were after she was moved on from the job.) Which could be her real legacy: one of image over reality.

On the credit side, 

• she did, as opposition MP, do a mini-Rosa Parks in walking out when women were refused permission to powhiri except from the back of the room
• she did, as leader, once proclaim National to believe in property rights (despite it being National who introduced the property-rights-destroying RMA) and did accurately point out that the ACT Party did not, saying "there they are arguing for more planners doing more planning rather than actually letting people get on with building their houses"
• she did, as leader of that same National Party, lead it to its second-worst-ever election defeat in 2020, with a 19% swing against
• she was one of the two National MPs who signed up to the bi-partisan accord on housing that helped lower rents and begin the blessed fall in over-priced house prices -- and then disgracefully remained silent has her new boss kicked it into touch, delaying real housing reform now for nearly four years.

Judith Collins arrived in Parliament after a decade in law and (govt-appointed) directorships as a young, fresh-faced MP in 2002, eager to solve the country's problems and to advance her own career. Without any ideas to guide her however she did nothing to solve anything, helped expand the role of government, and spent a life in service to the trough.

So, more exposure than most, but in the end no different to any of the other highly-paid beneficiaries there, really.

And now she's off to another taxpaid trough at the Law Commission ...

Collins in 2002: all promise, no substance

NB: Ele Ludemann posts a contrary assessment ...

Sovereignty: The Nature of Government

Over the course of the Enlightenment, ideas on sovereignty were changing – and were changing most on how sovereignty was justified. What gave anyone the right to boss someone else around?

To start at the beginning: “a government is an institution that holds the exclusive power to enforce certain rules of social conduct in a given geographical area.”[1] But who, or on what basis, gives a government the moral authority to do that.

Earlier times were happy to ignore the question, devolving these questions to ones about who had the power. Might made right. If Attila the Hun could invade and conquer, then Attila was your new sovereign. And if Attila needed a justification, there was always a witchdoctor to be cultivated who could supply one.[2]

This co-relationship between Attila and his assorted Witchdoctors eventually morphed into the idea of the Divine Right of Kings, a symbiotic relationship in which priest, Archbishop or Pope would sanctify the monarch in return for his organisation's elevation as the official state religion.

The relationship was a symbiotic one for them both.

The cosy power structure was dramatically overturned by Enlightenment thinkers like John Locke, who demolished any idea of Divine Right to rule, and argued instead that the sovereign’s moral authority derived only from the mandate of its citizens. Citizens, not subjects, was the new rule – the constitutional monarchy Locke helped establish being “tied up’ constitutionally to protect the individual rights established in the Bill of Rights, 1688.

This means that the government is not the ruler, but the servant or agent of the citizens; it means that the government as such has no rights except the rights delegated to it by the citizens for a specific purpose. [2]

The idea, when ill-defined, could go wrong – as it did in the French Revolution and later, when dictators proclaims themselves to represent or embody the will of the people. But the idea is a deceptively simple one that took years to develop and understand: that (as Thomas Jefferson was to phrase it [3]) government’s derive their just powers from the consent of the governed.

This -- that government could be a moral undertaking, for which consent was needed -- was a transformation in human affairs and was, arguably, the culmination of Enlightenment thinking.[4]

And it was the reason that, for a period from the early to mid-1800s (until the Indian Mutiny and ideas about utilitarian calculus began to change everything) Britain began asking for the informed consent of native populations in places in which it intended creating new sovereign governments.

But what exactly is the nature of government, and what form precisely does sovereignty take? READ ON...

"A government is an institution that holds the exclusive power to enforce certain rules of social conduct in a given geographical area....
    "The precondition of a civilised society is the barring of physical force from social relationships - thus establish­ing the principle that if men wish to deal with one an­other, they may do so only by means of reason: by discus­sion, persuasion and voluntary, un-coerced agreement.
    "The necessary consequence of man's right to life is his right to self-defence. In a civilised society, force may be used only in retaliation and only against those who initi­ate its use. All the reasons which make the initiation of physical force an evil, make the retaliatory use of physi­cal force a moral imperative....
    "The use of physical force - even its retaliatory use­ - cannot be left at the discretion of individual citizens. Peaceful coexistence is impossible if a man has to live under the constant threat of force to be unleashed against him by any of his neighbours at any moment. ...

"If physical force is to be barred from social relation­ships, men need an institution charged with the task of protecting their rights under an objective code of rules. This is the task of a government - of a proper govern­ment - its basic task, its only moral justification and the reason why men do need a government.
    "A government is the means of placing the retaliatory use of physical force under objective control - i.e., under objectively defined laws. ... This is the means of subordinating 'might' to 'right.' ...

The nature of the laws proper to a free society and the source of its government's authority are both to be de­rived from the nature and purpose of a proper govern­ment. The basic principle of both is indicated in The Declaration of Independence: 'to secure these [individ­ual] rights, governments are instituted among men, de­riving their just powers from the consent of the gov­erned . . .'' 

Since the protection of individual rights is the only proper purpose of a government, it is the only proper subject of legislation: all laws must be based on individ­ual rights and aimed at their protection. All laws must be objective (and objectively justifiable): men must know clearly, and in advance of taking an action, what the law forbids them to do (and why) , what constitutes a crime and what penalty they will incur if they commit it.
    "The source of the government's authority is 'the consent of the governed.' This means that the government is not the ruler, but the servant or agent of the citizens; it means that the government as such has no rights except the rights delegated to it by the citizens for a specific purpose.
    "There is only one basic principle to which an individ­ual must consent if he wishes to live in a free, civilised society: the principle of renouncing the use of physical force and delegating to the government his right of physi­cal self-defence, for the purpose of an orderly, objective, legally defined enforcement. Or, to put it another way, he must accept the separation of force and whim (any whim, including his own)....

"Such, in essence, is the proper purpose of a govern­ment: to make social existence possible to men, by pro­tecting the benefits and combating the evils which men can cause to one another."

~ Ayn Rand, from her essay 'The Nature of Government'

[1] Ayn Rand, ‘The Nature of Government.’
[2] The concept and mutually-dependent relationship of Attila and the Witchdoctor is explained in the title essay of Rand's 1961 book For the New Intellectual. In her view, the concept described two philosophical archetypes: "Attila, the man who rules by brute force…respects nothing but the physical reality immediately before him, respects nothing but man’s muscles, and regards a fist, a club, or a gun as the only answer to any problem—and the Witch Doctor, the man who dreads physical reality, dreads the necessity of practical action, and escapes into his emotions, into visions of some mystic realm where his wishes enjoy a supernatural power unlimited by the absolute of nature (pp. 8-9)."

[3] Ayn Rand, ‘The Nature of Government.’
[4] Jefferson, US 'Declaration of independence,' 1776
[5] See especially Peikoff, ‘The Nation of the Enlightenment,’ in Ominous Parallels, 1983

Proportionality in self-defence

I rarely cite a Lord here, and just as rarely a KC. But here we go, below, with a lengthy opinion by one Lord Verdirame, KC, on how Isreal's legitimate defensive goals against Hamas may be met -- as delivered to the UK House of Lords two days ago. 

There has been a lot of talk about proportionality in the law on self-defence. I refer to the words that the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, used a few days ago on the test of proportionality. It does not mean that the defensive force has to be equal to the force used in the armed attack. Proportionality means that you can use force that is proportionate to the defensive objective, which is to stop, to repel and to prevent further attacks.

Israel has described its war aims as the destruction of Hamas’s capability. From a legal perspective, these war aims are consistent with proportionality in the law of self-defence, given what Hamas says it does and what Hamas has done and continues to do.

Asking a state that is acting in self-defence to agree to a ceasefire before its lawful defensive objectives have been met is, in effect, asking that state to stop defending itself. For such calls to be reasonable and credible, they must be accompanied by a concrete proposal setting out how Israel’s legitimate defensive goals against Hamas will be met through other means. It is not an answer to say that Israel has to conclude a peace treaty, because Hamas is not interested in a peace treaty.

Proportionality also applies in the law that governs the conduct of hostilities, not only in self-defence. The law of armed conflict requires that in every attack posing a risk to civilian life, that risk must not be excessive in relation to the military advantage that is anticipated. That rule does not mean, even when scrupulously observed, that civilians will not tragically lose their lives in an armed conflict. The law of armed conflict, at its best, can mitigate the horrors of war but it cannot eliminate them. The great challenge in this conflict is that Hamas is the kind of belligerent that cynically exploits these rules by putting civilians under its control at risk and even using them to seek immunity for its military operations, military equipment and military personnel. An analysis of the application of the rules on proportionality in targeting in this conflict must always begin with this fact.

There has also been some discussion about siege warfare. The UK manual of the law of armed conflict, reflecting the Government’s official legal position—it is a Ministry of Defence document—says:

“Siege is a legitimate method of warfare … It would be unlawful to besiege an undefended town since it could be occupied without resistance”.

Gaza is not an undefended town. It is true that obligations apply to the besieging forces when civilians are caught within the area that is being encircled, and those obligations include agreeing to the passage of humanitarian relief by third parties. But it is not correct to say that encircling an area with civilians in it is not permitted by the laws of war.

A further point that concerns the laws of war is also of particular relevance to the British Government’s practice. It has already been mentioned that the Government have taken the view that Gaza remains under Israeli occupation, even though Israel pulled out in 2005. The traditional view until 2005 was that occupation required physical presence in the territory. That view is consistent with Article 42 of the Hague regulations of 1907, which states that a territory is occupied when it is actually placed under the authority of the occupying power. Again, it is also the view taken by the UK manual of the law of armed conflict, which reflects the UK’s official legal position and states that occupation ceases as soon as the occupying power evacuates the area. The European Court of Human Rights, in its jurisprudence, has also adopted a similar approach to occupation. So I have always been rather baffled by the British Government’s position on this issue, which, as far as I know, has not changed. Yes, it is true that Israel has exercised significant control over the airspace and in the maritime areas, but even as a matter of plain geography it takes two—Israel and Egypt —to control the land access points to Gaza.

More fundamentally, it is Hamas that has been responsible for the government and administration of Gaza. I appreciate that this is a legal matter on which the Minister may not want to respond immediately but it is an important one, because the legal fiction that Israel was still the occupying power under the laws of armed conflict has been relentlessly exploited by Hamas to blame Israel for everything, while using the effective control that it has over the territory, the people and the resources to wage war.

On a final note, I would like to say something briefly on the way in which the war is being reported. When a serious allegation is made, particularly one that could constitute a war crime, the immediate response of the law-abiding belligerent will be to say, “We are investigating”. The non-law-abiding belligerent, by contrast, will forthwith blame the other side and even provide surprisingly precise casualty figures. The duty to investigate is one of the most important ones in armed conflict. What happened in the way in which the strike on the hospital was reported is that the side that professes no interest whatever in complying with the laws of armed conflict was rewarded with the headlines that it was seeking.

[Hat tip A Halfling's View. Link added. Emphases mine.]

"A proper government is only a policeman, acting as an agent of man’s self-defence

"The only proper purpose of a government is to protect man’s rights....
    "A 'right'… means freedom from physical compulsion, coercion or interference by other men.... A crime is a violation of the right(s) of other men by force (or fraud)... This provide[s] the only valid justification of a government and define[s] its only proper purpose: to protect man’s rights by protecting him from physical violence....

    "The necessary consequence of man's right to life is his right to self-defence. In a civilised society, force may be used only in retaliation and only against those who initi­ate its use. All the reasons which make the initiation of physical force an evil, make the retaliatory use of physi­cal force a moral imperative.The nature of the laws proper to a free society and the source of its government's authority are both to be de­rived from the nature and purpose of a proper govern­ment.
    "A proper government is only a policeman, acting as an agent of man’s self-defence....
    "Observe the basic principle governing justice ... : it is the principle that no man may obtain any values from others without the owners' consent­ and, as a corollary, that a man's rights may not be left at the mercy of the unilateral decision, the arbitrary choice, the irrationality, the whim of another man....
    "Such, in essence, is the proper purpose of a govern­ment: to make social existence possible to men, by pro­tecting the benefits and combating the evils which men can cause to one another...
    "The proper functions of a government fall into three broad categories, all of them involving the issues of physi­cal force and the protection of men's rights: the police, to protect men from criminals - the armed services, to protect men from foreign invaders - the law courts, to settle disputes among men according to objective laws. ... [W]hat is essential here is the principle to be implemented: the principle that the purpose of law and of government is the protec­tion of individual rights.
    "Today, this principle is forgotten, ignored and evaded. The result is the present state of the world, with man­kind's retrogression to the lawlessness of absolutist tyran­ny, to the primitive savagery of rule by brute force."

~ Ayn Rand, composite quote from her essays 'The Nature of Government,' 'Man's Rights,' 'Galt's Speech,' and ''Political' Crimes'

"Arguments about [American] gun rights ... remain a mess"

"To see why it is proper for a government to regulate weapons and to understand the principles by which it should, we need to go back to some fundamental principles of moral philosophy, political philosophy, different kinds of rights, and the nature of government... 

    "You have a natural right to defend yourself against an attack, using unlimited force if necessary. But it still might rightly be illegal for you to own or carry a gun...
    "Remember, the proper question is not, 'Why can the government restrict my access to guns?' The proper question is, 'What share of its legal monopoly on the use of force should the government share with its citizens?' The proper answer is, 'Whatever is needed for those citizens to protect themselves when the government cannot.'
    "Unfortunately, this principle is not articulated in the [US] Constitution and we are stuck twisting the Second Amendment into service. Things would be better if we didn't have to....

    "The current situation in the US is a moral mess. The plainest constitutional defense for a right to own and carry a gun is no longer relevant. The main defense hangs by the thread of a 5–4 Supreme Court ruling weakened by its own caveat. The argument by economists and social scientists is morally empty. And the one possibly valid moral argument doesn’t appeal to any principle that is explicitly in the Constitution or that American politicians are sworn to uphold or, sadly, that people much believe in anymore.
    "Those wanting a morally strong argument for gun ownership should demand, primarily, protection of the natural right to self-defence and not of the civil rights of the Second Amendment. Those who want to help potential victims of murder, assault, and rape should not demand that those victims also surrender their natural right to defend themselves against such threats. Those social scientists honestly trying to determine social effects of particular gun laws should not propose that those determinations qualify as moral arguments, one way or the other. And those who believe a government’s job is to protect citizens’ natural rights should recognise that a government legitimately possesses a monopoly on force and with it a responsibility to regulate weapons.
    "Until we again recognise the difference between—and the relations between—civil rights and natural rights, and until we learn to again ground legislation in the protection of citizens’ natural rights and not on social statistics, arguments about gun rights will remain a mess."

~ John McCaskey, from his 2016 post 'Natural Rights, Civil Rights, and Guns'

Ban guns?

"To ban guns because criminals use them is to tell the law abiding that their rights and liberties depend not on their own conduct, but on the conduct of the guilty and the lawless." 

          ~ attrib. Lysander Spooner

A liberty lesson delivered by Dan Sanchez from 'the slap heard round the world.'

Ayn Rand

Image Credit: Public Domain

What John Galt Would Say to Will Smith

Guest post by Dan Sanchez

I'm not an avid follower of celebrity news -- truth be told I'm barely aware of who all these alleged celebrities are, or how they achieved this so-called status -- but there was an altercation at the Academy Awards last night that is not only consuming the attention of the media and the public, but is actually quite relevant to the ideas that this blog promotes. Call it a short hard lesson in liberty.

I'll let you look up the night's details if you haven't heard them yet, but this is what happened in brief. After the host Chris Rock delivered a joke about actress Jada Pinkett Smith, her husband Will Smith—the A-list actor—walked on stage and literally slapped Rock on live television. Smith then walked back and cursed the host from his seat.

As it turned out, later that night, Will Smith won the Oscar for Best Actor. In his acceptance speech, Smith tearfully apologised (although not to the person he struck).

Now, in a sense, this is a tempest in a teacup. In a world in which governments around the globe are waging wars on liberty, and in the Russian government's case even waging literal war on a civilian population, one highly-paid entertainer striking another in a public meltdown may be considered a distraction. But given that it is (appropriately or not) commanding public attention, we may as well try to extract lessons from it: especially for the benefit of teens and kids.

For most people, it is plain as day who was in the wrong on that stage. But it can be illuminating to reflect on exactly why.

Any young person would do well to frame what happened last night by reading "Galt's speech" from the best-selling novel Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. In that famous speech, Rand's character John Galt proclaims:

"So long as men desire to live together, no man may initiate—do you hear me? no man may start—the use of physical force against others."

This has been referred to by many others since as the "non-initiation of force" principle. The "initiation" part is key, because it establishes that forceful self-defense is legitimate. Understanding this principle is fundamental to understanding liberty and justice.

When judging any violent conflict, people naturally ask an important question -- and that important question is: "Who started it?" But a more precise phrasing would be: who started the violence? Who kicked off the force? Who initially violated someone else's person or property? In short (as you mother might have asked when you'd made your kid brother cry) who swung their fist first?

Will Smith clearly felt Chris Rock's joke was offensive and disrespectful. He may have thought it impugned his wife's honour. He may have regarded it as damaging to his family's reputation (although it can hardly be more damaging than how he responded).

But as Murray Rothbard wrote in The Ethics of Liberty, nobody has a property right in their reputation, because a reputation "is purely a function of the subjective attitudes and beliefs about him contained in the minds of other people." And a person, "can have no property right in the beliefs and minds of other people."

So, Rock's joke, whether it was funny or not, or all in good fun or even needlessly cruel, violated nobody's rights, and the one who initiated force was Smith, and was in the wrong.

It may seem silly to litigate a celebrity slap, but it is worthwhile to clarify these principles when they do come up because, however commonsensical they may seem, people reject them all the time (or misunderstand them, or ignore them... ), and we all suffer for that. For example, the way people frequently use the term "microaggression" threatens speech rights by blurring the line between non-violent behaviour and initiatory force. ("She microagressed me; that's hate speech!") And the bulk of public policy today uses government force to counter non-violent behaviour that some people find objectionable.

Liberty is constantly endangered because most people don't clearly see the line that separates just from unjust force. To save liberty, we need to educate the public (young people especially) about the ideas of liberty, especially the non-initiation of force.

To do that best, put down your phone replaying the slap, and pick up that book called Atlas Shrugged. Worst comes to worst, you can always use its weight in self-defence.

* * * * 

DAN SANCHEZ

Dan Sanchez is the Director of Content at the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) and the editor-in chief of FEE.org, where a version of this article previously appeared.

"If you think that one has a 'right' to burn down cities because George Floyd, you are against the concept of rights. If you think that citizens can look for a fight, and when they find it, kill people by right of 'self-defense,' you are against the Rule of Law..." #QotD

"If you think that one has a 'right' to burn down cities because George Floyd, you are against the concept of rights.
    "If you think that citizens can look for a fight, and when they find it, kill people by right of 'self-defense,' you are against the Rule of Law.
    "The Left says 'no justice, no peace.' The Right says 'there's a war on.'
    "These are the same in principle. And lead to the same in practice. Dictatorship."
          ~ Keith Weiner
.

"All men are born free and independent, and have certain natural, essential, and unalienable rights, among which may be reckoned the right of enjoying and defending their lives and liberties; that of acquiring, possessing, and protecting property; in fine, that of seeking and obtaining their safety and happiness." #QotD

"All men are born free and independent, and have certain natural, essential, and unalienable rights, among which may be reckoned the right of enjoying and defending their lives and liberties; that of acquiring, possessing, and protecting property; in fine, that of seeking and obtaining their safety and happiness."
          ~ John Adams
.

"If NZ's political class had looked to the history of gun control efforts they would have seen they were walking a well-trodden path that leads to a dead end. But then again, if they had enough foresight to know that ill-considered restrictions on personal liberty are usually counterproductive and often breed rebellion, they probably wouldn't have gone into government." Bonus #QotD

"Once again, responding to a horrendous crime by inflicting knee-jerk, authoritarian restrictions on innocent people proves to be an ineffective means of convincing people to obey. Specifically, New Zealand's government—which also stepped up censorship and domestic surveillance after bloody attacks on two Christchurch mosques earlier this year—is running into stiff resistance to new gun rules from firearms owners who are slow to surrender now-prohibited weapons and will probably never turn them in...
    "As of last week, only around 700 weapons had been turned over. There are an estimated 1.5 million guns—with an unknown number subject to the new prohibition on semiautomatic firearms—in the country overall...
    "Officials should have seen it coming...
    "Arguably, defiant gun owners are just being realistic in seeing little to gain by obeying restrictive laws that have their greatest impact on those who pose no threat to their neighbours...
    "If New Zealand's political class had looked to the history of gun control efforts they would have seen that they were walking a well-trodden path that leads to a dead end. But then again, if they had enough foresight to know that ill-considered restrictions on personal liberty are usually counterproductive and often breed rebellion, they probably wouldn't have gone into government."
        ~ Jerome Tuccille writing in Reason magazine
.

"Under pressure, democracies have a nasty habit of acting like panicked crowds, suppressing anything frightening or just different in a search for security and conformity... a grim illustration of just how vulnerable the "liberal" element of liberal democracy can be." BONUS #QotD

"Under pressure, democracies have a nasty habit of acting like panicked crowds, suppressing anything frightening or just different in a search for security and conformity...   "In the wake of [the brutal mass murders committed at two mosques in Christchurch], the country's government has succumbed to blind reaction by restricting speech, depriving innocent people of arms, and heightening domestic surveillance—intrusions into individual rights that are inherent whether or not governments and majorities formally respect them.  

  "It's a grim illustration of just how vulnerable the 'liberal' element of liberal democracy can be." 

          ~ Jerome Tuccille, from Reason magazine's 'In New Zealand, a Democracy Turns Against Itself'.

Gun buyback: Correlation is not causation [updated]

THE LABOUR-LED GOVERNMENT'S compulsory 'gun buyback' legislation is said by the Deputy Prime Minister to cost somewhere around $300 million. That would buy a lot of policemen.

So clearly the Labour-led Government, along with everyone else in Parliament except ACT's David Seymour, has concluded that this compulsory buyback will keep New Zealanders a lot safer than a lot more policemen will.
That doesn't say a lot for our policemen. (Nor does that figure say anything about the realistic cost of the buyback, which is more like billions than millions.)

But what do we know about how much safer the compulsory gun buyback will make us?
The fact is, neither the Labour-led Government, nor anyone else in Parliament really knows, because they haven't and won't have the time to do that research.

What they are really relying on is the alleged popular success of the Australian compulsory gun buyback after the Port Arthur massacre. So it's worth asking just exactly how successful that gun buyback was in making Australians safer. So I went to look for research that did look at how successful that had been in reducing lethal violence. In 2016 Science Direct published 'A systematic review of quantitative evidence about the impacts of Australian legislative reform on firearm homicide,' which concluded:

Australian studies have not found evidence of changes in lethal violence following gun law reform. Empirical findings about Australian gun law reform contradict ‘popular’ views about those laws...

    These [studies] examined various different time periods, and used a range of different statistical analysis methods. No study found statistical evidence of any significant impact of the legislative changes on firearm homicide rates.

That sounds fairly conclusive, right?

In fact, if you look at the rate gun deaths from 1998 to 2014, you would think New Zealand and Australia already had the same restrictions on guns:

Source: GunPolicy.Org

And yet Australia already has these restrictions that New Zealand politicians are now eagerly rushing through.

So what is going on here? Why do those two declining figures (great news, by the way!) seem about the same even though the two country's gun laws are so different? Why does the popular 'knowledge' of the Australian buyback success not tally with the Australian studies that have found no evidence of changes in lethal violence following gun law reform? Why, in summary, do empirical findings about Australian gun law reform contradict ‘popular’ views about those laws.

And what does it say about the gun buyback programme that the decline began nearly a decade before?

The simple answer from the researchers is this: that the rates of gun death were going down in any case. The evidence from those researchers is that the buyback did not cause the decline (which as you can see form the graph above began before 1996) it simply correlates with its continuation.

Correlation is not causation. Perhaps the popular view is so different because that simple lesson is still widely unlearned.

SO WHAT DO THE the results of Australian research on their buyback programme over there tell us we should expect to see as a result of spending around $300 million on the compulsory buyback programme here? "The results," says one, "suggest that the [buyback will] not have any large effects on reducing firearm homicide or suicide rates." In short, concludes another:

Although gun buybacks appear to be a logical and sensible policy that helps to placate the public’s fears, the evidence so far suggests 23 that in the Australian context, the high expenditure incurred to fund the 1996 gun buyback has not translated into any tangible reductions in terms of firearm deaths. 

As I was saying, $300 million would buy an awful lot of policemen. Not to fool ourselves that more policemen would have foiled this or any other shooting -- because a police response time of 36 minutes even of the almost-miraculous 6 minutes* to arrive at a site where unarmed people are being shot is telling proof otherwise -- but if we must have knee-jerk law and rushed spending decisions as a result of this massacre, why not head down that path instead of criminalising otherwise law-abiding gun-owners. (Not forgetting that the murderer himself broke existing gun laws in modifying his weapon before his lethal spree, reminding us that no matter what laws are passed, criminals -- like gangs -- will still ignore them whenever they feel like it.)

AND IF WE ARE serious about avoiding another atrocity like this one -- which is after all the alleged aim of this expensive legislation being rushed through with such unseemly haste -- then another unanswered question seems to present itself, which is this: what would you might most want to have with you when a man with a gun bursts through your door and starts shooting? A policeman to defend you all would be a fine thing to have, but in their absence – and experience from around the world tells us that a policeman can never be there in time to defend us – what you may most want is something to scare the gunman off. Just as this arsehole-with-a-gun was finally frightened away by a very brave man threatening the coward with an EFTPOS machine and with a shotgun the gunman had already discarded.

Because self-defence is still legal in New Zealand, just, under Section 48 of the Crimes Act “If one fears for their life or that of another.” Good law. The very same law that police are covered by when using firearms for their activities. Law however that is not set in stone, and that the police have for some time been wishing to overturn.
Could the outcome of the Mosque shootings have been different if the police upheld the law on self-defence instead of vilifying anyone who uses firearms for self-defence? We can never know.

After the Christchurch atrocity, and the political reaction to it, crime researcher Dr. John Lott asks the obvious question:

Police are extremely important in stopping crime, but the police can’t be there all the time. The police themselves understand that they virtually always arrive on the crime scene after the crime has occurred. And that raises a real question, what should people do when they’re having to confront a criminal by themselves?

Anyone like to have a crack at answering that? Because your politicians haven't. And won't.

But you should keep asking it.

We do know already that this rushed legislation will be followed by other more considered legislation, imposing further restrictions on gun ownership, and considering again a programme of costly gun registration. If there is an agenda, it will become apparent then. We must hope, and remain vigilant, that the agenda does not go from vilification of this legal right to removing it from the books altogether.

Because then where would we and other brave men be when we do need to defend ourselves? 

THIS IS NOT AT all to say that a government has no moral right to regulate weapons. Of course they do. Governments (properly) hold the legal monopoly over the use of force in a given geographic area. That's a fundamental definition of what a government is. Being a primary means of projecting force means that weapons and the regulation thereof must be permanently on their radar. But by what principle should this be done? As philosopher John Mccaskey patiently explains, 

To see why it is proper for a government to regulate weapons and to understand the principles by which it should, we need to go back to some fundamental principles of moral philosophy, political philosophy, different kinds of rights, and the nature of government... 

    You have a natural right to defend yourself against an attack, using unlimited force if necessary. But it still might rightly be illegal for you to own or carry a gun... 

      Remember, the proper question is not, 'Why can the government restrict my access to guns?' The proper question is, 'What share of its legal monopoly on the use of force should the government share with its citizens?' The proper answer is, 'Whatever is needed for those citizens to protect themselves when the government cannot.'

Those remain a Q+A that this government, and this country, still need to have. Why don't you begin asking and answering it for yourself?

* * * * * 

* The New York Times lays out the probable response timeline which, however rapid, still allowed the murderer to leave the first place of carnage and drive across town to create another:

It is unclear exactly what time the gunman entered Al Noor, which was crowded with worshipers for Friday Prayer. But the police said that they received the first call for help at 1:41 p.m., and that the first officers arrived there six minutes later.
    The video recorded by the gunman, which was livestreamed on Facebook, showed a man trying to tackle him inside the mosque, only to be shot and killed.
    Six minutes after firing his first shot, he drove away. Three minutes later, a siren can be heard on the video as he is driving to the second mosque.
    The siren becomes louder, then fades, suggesting the police and the gunman may have just missed each other, with officers and medical personnel racing toward Al Noor as he was pulling away. 
    About 30 front-line police officers would be on the streets of Christchurch around lunchtime on an average Friday, said Chris Cahill, a detective inspector who is president of a local labor union for police officers.
        When that first panicked call came in, he added, the dispatcher would have sent all of them to Al Noor….

    The police said a special armed tactical unit arrived at Al Noor Mosque four minutes after the first officers, or 10 minutes after the initial emergency call…
    “Any police force in the world — to get to the scene in six minutes, a specialist team there in 10 — that would be a success,” Cahill said.
Patrick Skinner, a former C.I.A. counterterrorism officer now working for an American police department, agreed.
  “I’d say that the police response was rather quick in a tactical sense,” he said, noting that the officers were rushing into a violent situation that was still unfolding — and that had been encouraged by individuals espousing bigotry and hatred.
    Still, it was not fast enough. The officers arrived to a horrific scene, with the dead and wounded outnumbering the city’s usual on-duty police force.

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