The English Crime Disaster and the Nature of the State

by Gene Callahan

Joyce Lee Malcolm, a professor of history at Bentley College and a senior adviser to the MIT Security Studies Program, has recently published an important new book, Guns and Violence: The English Experience. (The book received a very positive review from David Gordon in the Fall 2002 issue of The Mises Review.) For those who want to read a succinct summary of Malcolm's work, Reason Magazine has done us the service of publishing her in article format.

Because of the importance of Malcolm's findings, I will quote from the Reason article at some length:

In reality, the English approach has not reduced violent crime. Instead it has left law-abiding citizens at the mercy of criminals who are confident that their victims have neither the means nor the legal right to resist them. Imitating this model would be a public safety disaster for the United States.

The illusion that the English government had protected its citizens by disarming them seemed credible because few realized the country had an astonishingly low level of armed crime even before guns were restricted. A government study for the years 1890-92, for example, found only three handgun homicides, an average of one a year, in a population of 30 million. In 1904 there were only four armed robberies in London, then the largest city in the world. A hundred years and many gun laws later, the BBC reported that England’s firearms restrictions "seem to have had little impact in the criminal underworld." Guns are virtually outlawed, and, as the old slogan predicted, only outlaws have guns. Worse, they are increasingly ready to use them.

Nearly five centuries of growing civility ended in 1954. Violent crime has been climbing ever since. Last December, London’s Evening Standard reported that armed crime, with banned handguns the weapon of choice, was "rocketing." In the two years following the 1997 handgun ban, the use of handguns in crime rose by 40 percent, and the upward trend has continued. From April to November 2001, the number of people robbed at gunpoint in London rose 53 percent.

Gun crime is just part of an increasingly lawless environment. From 1991 to 1995, crimes against the person in England’s inner cities increased 91 percent. And in the four years from 1997 to 2001, the rate of violent crime more than doubled. Your chances of being mugged in London are now six times greater than in New York. England’s rates of assault, robbery, and burglary are far higher than America’s, and 53 percent of English burglaries occur while occupants are at home, compared with 13 percent in the U.S., where burglars admit to fearing armed homeowners more than the police.

What I wish to contemplate here is the rationale Malcolm ascribes to English gun control advocates: "[p]eople don’t need to protect themselves because society will protect them." When someone forwards such a proposition, it is often useful to analyze his use of words. For instance, what, exactly, is meant by "society" in the above statement?

Generically speaking, "society" is a name for the interactions of all of the individuals who make up society, at whatever level of subdivision of all humanity one chooses to cordon off as a society. Since every act that takes place in a society is the act of some individual, any concept of society is, in a very fundamental sense, constructed using individual human action as its building blocks. In fact, Mises first used the term "sociology" to signify what he would later call "praxeology": the theoretical study of human action in all its manifestations. It was only when "sociology" began to mean statistical studies of mechanically operating "social forces" that Mises abandoned the earlier term.

So, when people say that "society" should protect individuals, which specific individuals do they mean? Perhaps they mean that, while one shouldn't protect oneself, one can expect protection from other members of society who happen to be on hand at your time of need? While you can't pull out your own gun to fend off a mugger, it is fine for me to pull out my gun to fend off the fellow who is mugging you. I seriously doubt that scenario would please the advocates of "societal protection." After all, if that were what they meant, they certainly wouldn't have instituted a handgun ban in the UK. Instead, they might require that every person be packing heat at all times. While not permitted to protect himself with his rod, every citizen would be expected to help his fellows when they are in distress. But the law forbids that just as much as it does self-defense. Indeed, as Malcolm points out, "Police advise those who witness a crime to 'walk on by' and let the professionals handle it."

Do the proponents of "societal protection" instead mean that individuals can't protect themselves, but acting as members of a church group or corporation or social club they could act to protect each other? Again, the laws they recommend rule out this interpretation. There are no exceptions to the various laws forbidding self-defense and the carrying of "offensive" weapons for members of social groups. A minister is no more permitted to carry a weapon than is his flock, and one cannot obtain an exemption from the laws because one has an exceptional number of business associates.

It is clear that "society" is, at least in the case of British law, a euphemism, covering up the naked truth of what the doctrine of "societal protection" really means: All individuals must be completely reliant on the State for their safety. If you are attacked and the minions of the State are not on hand to protect, you must suffer whatever your attackers wish to do to you, or you will be punished.

Lest it be thought that I exaggerate, I will note a couple of examples from Malcolm:

• In 1987 two men assaulted Eric Butler, a 56-year-old British Petroleum executive, in a London subway car, trying to strangle him and smashing his head against the door. No one came to his aid. He later testified, "My air supply was being cut off, my eyes became blurred, and I feared for my life." In desperation he unsheathed an ornamental sword blade in his walking stick and slashed at one of his attackers, stabbing the man [sic] in the stomach. The assailants were charged with wounding. Butler was tried and convicted of carrying an offensive weapon.

• In 1994 an English homeowner, armed with a toy gun, managed to detain two burglars who had broken into his house while he called the police. When the officers arrived, they arrested the homeowner for using an imitation gun to threaten or intimidate. In a similar incident the following year, when an elderly woman fired a toy cap pistol to drive off a group of youths who were threatening her, she was arrested for putting someone in fear. Now the police are pressing Parliament to make imitation guns illegal.

I think the gun control issue brings us to a crucial aspect of social theory. Although rendering citizens helpless and reliant on the State might, in fact, be the intended result of the evolution of British law in the twentieth century, we need not regard it as such to acknowledge that it is the effective result. As Hayek famously put it, many social outcomes are "the result of human action but not of human design."

There are distinct advantages to recognizing the ubiquity of unintended consequences in social policy. The alternative is to view any societal outcome as the result of some person or persons' plan to achieve that outcome. When social policy goes seriously astray from its stated intentions, the latter view posits a conspiracy as the cause.

Now, I would not for a moment deny that conspiracies exist. Clearly, there are many occasions when groups of people secretly plot actions that they hope will achieve a certain result. Often, their perceived need for secrecy springs from a perception that, were it known that they were plotting the results they intend, other people would resist their plans and they would be condemned for their actions. But as a universal explanation for undesirable social circumstances, conspiracy theories have several shortcomings.

First of all, they often concede extraordinary capabilities to the conspirators. If Lenin or Stalin, openly planning to achieve a particular social outcome and willing to use the whole of the resources of the Soviet state to reach the desired result, could not succeed, why would we suspect that secret conspirators, having to cover their tracks and disguise their employment of the state's power, should be able to achieve their ends? The law of unintended consequences applies just as much to those planning covertly as to those doing so openly. And we must contemplate the extraordinary efforts necessary to keep a conspiracy secret.

Secondly, placing the blame for generally undesirable outcomes on conspiracies tends to distract from more fundamental, institutional analysis of those results. If the reason the state seeks to disarm citizens is merely that a cabal of evil people are currently in charge of the state, then the obvious solution is to replace them with good people who have better intentions.

Such a solution ignores the nature of the state itself. Hayek demonstrated that as a state grows in power and intrusiveness, there is an increasingly stronger tendency for the worst to rise to the top of the government hierarchy. This is due to the fundamental difference between the State and a private organization: while a private organization must persuade others to deal with it on the terms it desires, the State claims that it may legitimately force others to deal with it on its terms.

That insight does not prevent us from morally condemning certain forms of persuasion. For instance, when a car manufacturer uses the lure of sex to sell cars, we might have justification for condemning its advertising technique. But no one is forced to fall prey to its lure, and the proper means to defeat it is to persuade people that the idea that owning a particular car will allow you to "score" more often is both sleazy and ridiculous. If our persuasion is successful, that particular form of advertising will vanish.

On the other hand, whether or not people are persuaded that any specific state program is sleazy and ridiculous, they must still comply with the program or being willing to suffer violence at the hand of the State. Since it is the threat or employment of violence upon which the effectiveness of every state program rests, it should be clear that those most skilled at threatening and employing violence will be the most successful at operating the mechanisms of the State.

The government hierarchy of bureaucratic and political positions acts as a filtering mechanism to ensure that only those with the "proper" way of thinking gain great power. The filter can allow through Communists, social democrats, fascists, and even moderate classical liberals. What it won't pass, except in rare accidents, are people who would question the absolute authority of the state to employ force to gain compliance with its edicts. As long as the principle is accepted, the bedrock of State power remains unshaken, and, over the long run, those best able to employ violence will tend to gain the upper hand. (One of the lessons of the twentieth century is that "best able" does not mean "most willing." Rulers have learned that it is best to hide the State's fist in a velvet glove. Too raw a display of State power can make the ruler's subjects uneasy.)

Those populating the government's offices, especially those whose careers revolve around government employment, are gradually educated, by the entire milieu in which they operate, in the ideology of state authority. If you spend enough time in such environs, it will seem obvious and natural that guns are better kept in the hands of officers of the government – after all, such guns are always pointed away from you! It will be crystal clear that it is a dangerous situation when private citizens defend themselves. Their need for your protection won't be as acute, and they might be tempted to cut your department's budget.

To continue to advance in such a setting, one must keep making the "hard choices." One's heart may say the eighteen-year-old kid who sold an undercover agent a hit of acid at a Grateful Dead concert doesn't seem like a criminal who should be placed in prison for 20 years, but "the law is the law."

"Somehow," a mayor will tell himself, "evicting a group of elderly residents from their lifelong neighborhood to make way for a new Costco seems, well… not quite just. But we all know perfect justice doesn't exist, and it's not like there wasn't a vote taken on it. Those old folks had their 30 minutes say at the council meeting!" A social worker gives herself a little pep talk: "Those kids we seized from their loving parents because we didn't like the way they were educating them… Well, we had experts assuring us that the kids development was being retarded." A military officer, distressed about the bombed out neighborhoods and grieving families left in the wake of a victory tells himself, "War is hell, but at least we were fighting to help free those poor people." (The extent to which Colin Powell, who seems to be a naturally decent man, has fallen into step with the Bush administration policy on Iraq, despite his obvious misgivings, is a recent example of the power of State training to overcome moral scruples.) After saying them enough times, these justifications will roll easily off the tongue, sounding downright convincing.

So while there may be government officials who act with the explicit goal of rendering the population helpless, I am sure there are many others who would be genuinely shocked if you suggested such an idea to them. "Ridiculous!" they would tell you. "We just want citizens to feel empowered to walk the streets safely without being armed like Rambo. It's our responsibility to create a safe environment where people don't need to go around with guns and ornamental swords." What's more, they would not be lying to you any more than they are lying to themselves.

The fundamental problem with human slavery was not that the slaves needed better owners. Of course, if I were a slave, I'd rather be owned by Thomas Jefferson than some vicious thug. But I'd still be a slave! The fundamental problem was that slavery itself was an unjust institution. Even the "good" slave owners had to keep their slaves subservient and oppressed, or they soon would have ceased to be slave owners.

Similarly, while there may be people manning the State who are deliberately conspiring against their citizens, replacing them with a different set of rulers is only a palliative. Again, I would rather have Jefferson as my ruler than Stalin, but I would still be ruled.

Whether gun control advocates intend to turn their citizens into helpless children looking to the parental state for protection, or their actions merely achieve that result accidentally, would be relevant if we were trying them for their misdeeds. But for solving the basic problem the question is irrelevant. To paraphrase the 1992 Clinton campaign, "It's the institution, stupid."

Copyright © 2002 Gene Callahan

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