"A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed." Pretty clear, right? It is to the DC Court of Appeals, which struck down Washington, DC's gun ban as unconstitutional. (I might add that the ban, in addition to being unconstitutional, was stupid, in that DC regularly has had one of the highest murder rates since law-abiding citizens were denied their right to bear arms in 1976.) The New York Times snipes, "The court relied on a constitutional interpretation that has been rejected by nine federal appeals courts around the nation." Maybe so, but that just proves how convoluted and politicized those nine courts were. The DC Court of Appeals, finally, got it right.

Isn't "constitutional interpretation" what it's all about? Clearly, the Libs are trying to re-write the rules through mis-interpretation and hijack this country at every turn.

Dan, if banning guns has something to do with the crime rate, then care to explain why it took 10 years for the crime rate in DC to change? Are you making misleading statements on purpose, or do you really believe in man-made gun barrel warming? The trend looks cyclical to me.

Care to name any sources for that assertion, Brian? Are you contending gun ownership by private citizens doesn't reduce violent crime? It's hard to tell from your post.

I have the best kind of source: raw data.
District of Columbia Crime Index Rates Per 100,000 Inhabitants

I see no evidence that gun ownership has an effect.

Brian: I don't see Dan state any causality. All he says is the ban was "stupid" because "DC regularly has had one of the highest murder rates since law-abiding citizens were denied their right to bear arms in 1976." This assertion implies that banning guns hasn't helped alleviate crime in DC, but it doesn't say (what I think is probably true) that when among the citizens only criminals have guns the crime rate will be worse.

And both the weaker position (that Dan's post implies) and the stronger position which I have advocated) are consistent with there being plenty of other factors correlated with violent crime.

"Since" in this context either means "because" or "after." If Dan meant "because," as I originally interpreted him to, he is making an unsupported claim of causation. One the other hand, if he meant "after," then he's telling a half-truth to support an irrelevant conclusion.

Also, your characterization of a gun-controlled society as one where "among the citizens only criminals have guns" ignores the fact that fewer criminals would have guns.

Is this what they call 'mental masterbation?

Yes, if by "this" you mean your own post or Dan's use of fallacies rather than evidence to support his point of view. It is very self-serving for him to cite a difference of opinion between himself and others (specifically, those nine appeals courts) as proof of bias. That is a circular argument (also known as begging the question).

Brian: Dan is begging the question for daring to disagree with nine appeals courts? No less than the New York Times is by citing the nine appeals courts.

Fallacies? Get off it. First, his use of the past perfect ("has had") followed by a date (1976) rather clearly indicates that "since" in this line is to be read as "after," not as "because." But even if we would all grant your uncharatable reading of "because," it is unfair to say that the claim that hand gun bans are causally connected with higher crime rates is "unsupported." Did he cite support here? No. But any fool who follows these things knows it has been so supported (See John Lott's work).

It is a little odd that you take such a short post, read a slight grammatical ambiguity uncharatably, and reach absurdly to accuse the man of reasoning fallaciously. Perhaps you just disagree with him? Say so, instead of dropping jargon to impress the uninitiated.

Re-read what I said. I accused him of begging the question for the statement "that just proves how convoluted and politicized those nine courts were." Yeah, if you already accept the conclusion as true, that proves the conclusion is true. Begging the question.

Also, the New York Times article can't be begging the question because it is not editorializing or making any arguments. It is just reporting news.

And I never made the claim that there is no support for the idea that gun bans cause an increase in crime; I only stated that Dan Flynn presented no such evidence in his claim. I always try to give people the benefit of the doubt when interpreting them, but in this case I had exhausted all possibility that he wasn't making some kind of fallacy. As I explained, he was either presenting a completely irrelevant fact or he was trying to connect the gun ban with the crime rate. I chose the interpretation where he would actually have a reason for citing the fact that he cited. Do you see a third possible meaning behind his statement?

Brian: The fact that DC was, for several years, the murder capital of the United States, after banning handguns, is not a "completely irrelevant fact." The gun ban, obviously, didn't work as advertised. The other possibility you find is that I "was trying to connect the gun ban with the crime rate." What do you know what I was trying to do? What I did is point out a fact: DC banned guns and subsequently boasted a larger proprotion of murders than any other city in the United States. This is an inconvenient fact for anyone touting the benefits of gun control, but it's a fact nonetheless. Your comments on this thread are silly because they inject an argument that is not in the post, and then attempt to refute the argument. This is a classic strawman scenario (My apologies for not providing a link to wikipedia for 'strawman'). What's sad is that, despite using a strawman, you haven't even suceeded in knocking it down.

Brian: In begging the question, the conclusion must appear in the premises. That the courts are politicized and convoluted is not an equivalent proposition to the claim that they are wrong about the 2d amendment. So it is not qb-ing. Now, lots of people misuse the phrase "question begging", and I think you are here. They often mean that the person is ignoring a deeper, more important question, and they sometimes mean that the person is disagreeing with them. It seems to me you are doing one of these two when you use the phrase "begging the question" in response to Flynn'sline about the NYT.

Of course he was trying to "connect" the gun ban with the crime rate in some way by putting them in the same sentence, but there a many types of connection, and you are attributing to him the strongest possible type, as though the crime rate was completely and directly caused by the gun ban. This is not a charitable reading, even if you think of yourself as charitable... Here is a weaker connection that can do the trick. His sentence indicates that the direct causal connection between the gun ban and decreased violent crime, alleged by the proponents of the ban, is false.

Brian, your position on gun control is logically impossible to support, since it is impossible to determine whether or not the costs of gun control exceed the benefits.

Its just another manifestation of Mises' Economic Calculation Problem. However, the fact that it has not even yielded the perceived benefit that its proponents claimed it would (lower rates of gun crime) makes it doubly impossible.

Whenever there is a debate about whether or not to enact a policy, it is the person who believes that the policy ought be enacted that bears the burden of proof (since they are making the evidentiary assertion). Thus, it is up to you to do the impossible, and prove that the benefits of gun control outweigh the costs.

Dan, I actually don't hold a strong view on gun control, so I'm more concerned with the style of debate people are using than I am with what position they are supporting. I openly admit I don't know what you were trying to do, but I can at least try to consider all the possibilities. If every interpretation I can think of is a fallacious argument, then I will conclude that you have made a fallacy. If at least one interpretation is a valid argument, I'll assume that the valid argument is the argument you were trying to make. So far, I haven't seen a valid argument in your statement.

What if the opposite happened and DC had removed a gun ban in 1976 rather than instating one, and the crime rate didn't change? Would you accept my argument if I said it was "stupid since DC regularly has had one of the highest murder rates since everyone was given easy access to guns in 1976"? That's an argument I would never make.

It really isn't relevant that the crime rate was high after the gun ban. What is relevant is what happened to the crime rate after guns were banned. The facts about the crime rate both before and after 1976, when combined, make relevant information for discussion, but if you only tell half of the information, you're telling a half-truth. I could just as easily have used only the first half of the data by saying "before they banned guns in 1976, DC had one of the highest crime rates in the country." It's a true statement, but it's still misleading.

Skeptic:

If that is his argument, he still should have cited the complete information, that guns were banned and the crime rate didn't change. Also I don't think DC is a very good example to point at for that argument because it's just a small city. The proponents of gun control usually argue that it will reduce crime (or at least the lethality of crime) by reducing the availability to criminals of a tool that is useful for committing crimes. Banning guns in a small city, where they remain available only a few miles away, isn't going to do this, so a drop in crime shouldn't be expected.

To address the other issue you brought up, question begging is usually done using an implicit assumption of the conclusion rather than an explicitly stated assumption. If the court's ruling on the second amendment proves that they are "convoluted and politicized," then it must be because the ruling is wrong. This is both a conclusion he is trying to support and an assumption he made in trying to support the conclusion.

Ben:

I looked up the Economic Calculation Problem (you can guess where), and while it is an interesting idea, I don't think it applies to this issue. Guns are an end product, so banning them isn't going to affect the production of other goods. Also, while the economic calculation problem shows, in general, the difficulty of calculating the value of goods, I don't believe it proves that there are no goods for which the value can be calculated accurately, especially when the market is mostly free.

Brian: He is quite explicit that he thinks that the nine courts' rulings were wrong about the second amendment. Disagree with him, but don't act as though he is begging the question by merely stating an opinion. (That is what I meant when I said that some people use the phrase whenever someone merely says something they disagree with.) If he is correct that they are wrong about the second amendment, then it is evidence for the distinct claim that they are politicized. So that doesn't amount to begging the question either.

I guess my point, from the beginning, has been that you should have the guts to disagree with people on substance instead of hiding behind complaints about logical procedure, which here came across as attempts to intimidate people with logical jargon.

Brian: I think you might want to look at DC murder statistics in relation to its population drop (more murders + less people = higher murder rate) and in relation to the national murder statistics. This is extraneous to my original factual point, which you continue to label "fallacious"--not because it is fallacious, but because you don't like its implications--that DC banned guns and then became the murder capital in addition to the actual capital. But I think it has relavence to the point you are trying to make. The U.S. murder rate doubled in the fifteen years or so leading up to 1977 (the year DC's 1976 gun ban, formally called the Firearms Control Regulations Act of 1975, went into effect). In the years after 1977 (the year DC's 1976 gun ban, formally called the Firearms Control Regulations Act of 1975, went into effect), the national murder rate began to stabilize and then declined. But as the national murder rate declined, DC's murder rate exploded. So, inspite of the surrounding society's drop in the murder rate, DC's rate went up. What changed? Many things, but specific to DC the gun control laws did. You may not believe gun control has had much to do with the criminal anarchy in parts of DC. But you must concede that the law did not work as advertised, no? Do you think gun control a success in DC? You can't get any worse than having the highest murder rate, and for many individual years after the passage of the gun ban DC had the highest murder rate in the U.S.

To make a long post short, gun control failed miserably in DC.

Skeptic: If he was just stating an opinion without claiming to have proven anything, then that's fine. I just took objection to his use of the phrase "that just proves."

Dan: I've been looking at "Crime Index Rates Per 100,000 Inhabitants" this whole time.

"But as the national murder rate declined, DC's murder rate exploded. So, inspite of the surrounding society's drop in the murder rate, DC's rate went up."

You made it sound like DC's murder rate was going up at the same time the US murder rate was going down. There were only three years since 1977 where DC had an increase in murder and the US had a decrease: 1981, 1987, and 1996. And DC has never had a trend of increasing murder at the same time that the US murder rate was going down.

To call gun control or any other plan a failure requires an assumption about what it is trying to accomplish. Different people support gun control for different reasons, so whether or not it is a failure is subjective. If you stick to purely objective facts, you have to make statements such as "the gun ban had no effect for ten years." I understand that isn't as much fun as attaching negative words to gun control.

The data indicates that DC's crime rate won't change as the gun ban goes away. Do I get to call the lifting of the gun ban a "miserable failure"?