Politics

Despite professing that I'm some kind of liberal, I tend to find myself in regular disagreement with articles posted over at the Thoughts on Freedom, the Australian Libertarian Society Blog. This week there have been a few articles posted there which I thought were worth pointing out.

I've posted before on guns and how I think they're generally a Bad Thing. Temujin posted a really good roundup of the research into the relationship between guns and crime. His conclusion comes in two parts: (a) there's not really enough evidence to conclude strongly in either direction, and (b) given the lack of evidence the only way to conclude is that gun laws should be less restrictive.

At the risk of putting a dent in my libertarian cred¹, I'm going to say I agree with (a) but not with (b). Preferring greater availability of something which provides deadly force, simply because you can't conclude given the available evidence whether it creates a positive or negative externality (the effect on the crime rate is an externality), in my opinion, is the wrong conclusion. Deadly Force is bad, mmmmk.

Another good article over there points out some ALP silliness which I hope stops very soon.

1. Like I had any to begin with. [↩]