Make it expensive

One of the reasons we have police, prisons, and other forms of punishment is to make crime expensive. The assumption is that if it costs too much to carry out a crime, you won't do it.

Winds of Change has several posts on the right to bear arms, and how it deters tyrrany of all sorts. It becomes too expensive to repress the masses.

We'll start with the story of civil rights leader Robert F. Williams:

"Luther Hodges ... was the governor of South Carolina at the time. We appealed to him. He took sides with the Klan.... Then we appealed to President Eisenhower but we never received a reply to our telegrams. There was no response at all from Washington. So we started arming ourselves. I wrote to the National Rifle Association in Washington which encourages veterans to keep in shape to defend their native land and asked for a chapter, which I got."

This was in 1957. Monroe, North Carolina. The NRA granted him a chapter without hesitation or question. And this was a man who would not crawl, or be anything other than a man:

"In a year we had sixty members. We had bought some guns, too, in stores, and later a church in the North raised money for us and we got better rifles. The Klan discovered we were arming and guarding our community. In the summer of 1957 they made one big attempt to stop us. An armed motorcade attacked Dr. Perry's house, which is situated on the outskirts of the colored community. We shot it out with the Klan and repelled their attack and the Klan didn't have any more stomach for this type of fight. They stopped raiding our community."

Blogger David Hardy notes that there were no fatalities, on either side. He adds:

"BTW, (1)that's by no means the only time Williams and his friends had to use firearms to defend themselves, and (2) there was no sense calling the police, since two police cars were in the Klan cavalcade!"

Against thug militias, even those that included trained police officers, guns ARE effective. Sudan's Janjaweed are similar: a thug militia with some al-Qaeda. Zimbabwe, same deal. Rwanda was the personification of thug militias.

This won't deter every last thug, but the greater the chance that any thug may not come home from his enforcement job, the fewer enforcers will be available, the less enthusiastically they'll do their job, and the more force will be available to direct against the more determined.

This has been a production of Better Living Through Economics