Covered at Reason 24/7: Despite Focus on Gun Restrictions, More States Move To Loosen Laws

Almost all of the media attention is on
states like New York, Connecticut, Colorado and Maryland that have
moved to restrict self-defense rights by making it harder to
legally own and use firearms. But some scribblers at the West
Coast's dear old newspaper of (scratchy) sort-of record peeked up
over their cubicle walls and noticed something unexpected: Even
more states are moving to protect the right to bear arms,
and even to loosen restrictions on guns. Howdatappen? As
reporters Mark Z. Barabak and Melanie Mason put it, "[t]he result
is a significant disparity between states — some side by side — as
President Obama pushes for new federal gun controls." Not just a
significant disparity, you should note, but a growing divergence in
the legal treatment of self-defense rights at the state level.

From the
Los Angeles Times:

The first state to act after December's Sandy Hook shooting was
New York, where Republicans control the Senate and Democrats the
Assembly. Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat, worked with lawmakers of
both parties to pass a sweeping bill that beefed up the state's ban
on assault-style weapons and required universal background
checks.

Other states have moved in the opposite direction, loosening
restrictions on gun ownership and increasing the number of places
where firearms are permitted. Many have Republican governors, a
Republican-run statehouse or both.

In Michigan and Ohio, lawmakers have made it easier to obtain a
gun. Arkansas, Maine and Mississippi have passed laws to protect
the privacy of gun owners. Wyoming enacted legislation allowing
judges to carry weapons in the courtroom, and South Dakota passed a
law authorizing school employees to carry guns on the job.

More than a dozen other states are considering legislation that
would enhance gun rights, including Texas, North Carolina, Missouri
and Georgia.

As you might guess, not all state-level control freaks are happy
that their counterparts elsewhere are moving law in a
less-authoritarian direction. But, you know, tough shit.

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Why I'm Teaching My Son To Break the Law

In 1858, hundreds of
residents of Oberlin and Wellington, Ohio—many of them students and
faculty at Oberlin College—surrounded Wadsworth's Hotel, in
Wellington, in which law enforcement officers and slavehunters held
a fugitive slave named John Price, under the authority of the
Fugitive Slave Act. After a brief standoff, the armed crowd stormed
the hotel and overpowered the captors. Price was freed and
transported to safety in Canada (that's a photo of some of the
rescuers in the courtyard of the Cuyahoga County Jail, below and to
the right). I know these details because my son recently borrowed
from the library
The Price of Freedom, a book about the Oberlin-Wellington
Rescue, as the
incident is called (PDF). My wife and I used it as a starting
point for telling our seven-year-old why we don't expect
him to obey the law—that laws and the governments that pass them
are often evil. We expect him, instead, to stand up for his rights
and those of others, and to do good, even if that means breaking
the law.

Our insistence on putting right before the law isn't a new
position. I've always liked Ralph Waldo Emerson's sentiment that
"Good men must not obey the laws too well." That's a well-known
quote, but it comes from a longer essay in which he
wrote:

Republics abound in young civilians, who believe that the laws
make the city, that grave modifications of the policy and modes of
living, and employments of the population, that commerce,
education, and religion, may be voted in or out; and that any
measure, though it were absurd, may be imposed on a people, if only
you can get sufficient voices to make it a law. But the wise know
that foolish legislation is a rope of sand, which perishes in the
twisting ...

Rope of sand the law may be,
but it can strangle unlucky people on the receiving end long before
it perishes. John Price could well have ended up with not just the
law, but a real rope, around his neck, just because he
wanted to exercise the natural freedom to which he was entitled by
birth as a sapient being.

John Price ended his life as a free man because he was willing
to defy laws that said he was nothing but the property of other
people, to be disposed of as they wished. He got a nice helping
hand in maintaining his freedom from other people who were willing
to not only defy laws that would compel them to collaborate in
Price's bondage, but to beat the hell out of government agents
charged with enforcing those laws.

Emerson would likely have approved. His son reported years later
that, upon learning that his children were writing school
compositions about building houses, he
told them, "you must be sure to say that no house nowadays is
perfect without having a nook where a fugitive slave can be safely
hidden away."

Much influenced by Emerson, but more down to Earth, Henry David
Thoreau went to jail (however briefly) for refusing to pay tax to
support the Mexican War. In an essay now known as "Civil Disobedience," he
wrote:

Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree,
resign his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a
conscience then? I think that we should be men first, and subjects
afterward. It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law,
so much as for the right. The only obligation which I have a right
to assume is to do at any time what I think right.

This is the same essay in which Thoreau famously stated, "that
government is best which governs not at all." Government was not an
institution he held in high regard. He fretted that soldiers,
police, and other officials "serve the state thus, not as men
mainly, but as machines" and that "in most cases there is no free
exercise whatever of the judgment or of the moral sense; but they
put themselves on a level with wood and earth and stones."

Ours being a more academic and less poetic age, Thoreau's
sentiments are likely to be captured these days as embodying the
divide between Lawrence Kohlberg's
stages of moral development. Specifically, they mark the
difference between conventional thinkers who believe the law is due
obedience because somehow it defines morality, and
post-conventional thinkers who believe that higher principles take
precedence over the law.

Yeah, I prefer Emerson and Thoreau, too.

Personally, I would say that I love liberty
more than any other value, and I don't give a damn if my neighbors
or the state disagree. I will be free, and I'm willing to help
others be free, if they want my assistance. Screw any laws to the
contrary. I don't think social psychologist Jonathan Haidt would be
surprised at my attitude. According to him,
that's what makes libertarians tick. And that's what my wife
and I are trying to pass on to our son.

Slavery and the Mexican War are, thankfully, dead issues in this
country, but that doesn't mean there's any shortage of
objectionable restrictions and mandates laid upon us by law and the
government. Taxes, nanny-state restrictions, business regulations,
drug laws ... All beg for defiance. The Fugitive Slave Law may no
longer command Americans to do evil, but "safety" rules would have
physicians
and
mental health professionals snitch on their patients. And
there's always another military adventure, someplace, on which
politicians want to expend other people's blood and money.

I sincerely hope that my son never has to run for his freedom in
defiance of evil laws, like John Price. I also hope, at least a
little, that he never has to beat the stuffing out of police
officers, as did the residents of Oberlin and Wellington, to defend
the freedom of another. But, if he does, I want him to do so
without reservations.

If all my son does is live his life a little freer than the law
allows, then we've done some good. A few regulations ignored and
some paperwork tossed in the garbage can make the world a much
easier place in which to live. Better yet, if he sits on a jury or
two and stubbornly refuses to find any reason why he should convict
some poor mark who was hauled in for owning a forbidden firearm or
for ingesting the wrong chemicals.
Jury nullification isn't illegal (yet), but it helps others
escape punishment for doing things that are, but ought not be. No
harm, no foul is a good rule for a juror, no matter what lawmakers
say.

And, if he wants to go beyond that, and actively help people
defy the prohibitions and authoritarian outrages of the years to
come, he'll be cheered on by me, his mother, and perhaps even
(depending on your views on the matter) an approving audience of
spectral ancestors. Our family has
long experience with scoffing at the law. Purveying the
forbidden or conveying the persecuted are honorable occupations,
whether done for profit or out of personal commitment.

As I think our son has already come to appreciate, making the
world freer is always right, especially when the law is wrong.

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3D Printing Will Make Gun Control Laws Irrelevant, J.D. Tuccille Tells RT America

Yesterday, RT America ran a
report on the impact of 3D printing on the debate over firearms and
gun control laws. RT's Marina Portnaya interviewed me for the
report, and I told her
what I've written

before: 3D printing has the ability to decentralize
manufacturing to the DIY level and thereby render legal
restrictions irrelevant. If prohibited or restricted items can be
created in the privacy of your home or office, the law doesn't
matter. We also discussed chemical printing and CNC machines, but
as is often the case, only a brief bit on 3D printing made it into
the report, There's no
embeddable version available The embedded video is below, or
you can see it
here. My contribution begins at the 3:00 mark.

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Certificate-of-Need Laws Prevent Access to Lifesaving Medical Technology

Colorectal cancer is the second leading cause of cancer death in
the United States. In large part, that’s because less than half of
the population that should be getting screened isn’t getting
screened.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Medical science has found a way
to use CT scanners to do screenings non-invasively, negating the
need to insert a colonoscope into the rectum and large intestine.
But for regulatory hurdles, people could just go to a clinic, pay
for a quick photo & analysis session and be on their way.

However, as of 2010, 13 states require medical institutions to
get permission, in the form of a “certificate of need,” before
purchasing new CT scanners. Other states require doctors to obtain
a certificate of need before offering new medical procedures like
virtual colonoscopies, which are still relatively cutting edge.

From Darpana Sheth of the Institute for Justice, writing in the

Daily Caller:

In a lengthy and expensive process, verging on full-blown
litigation, medical providers must demonstrate a “need” for the
proposed services. Worse, existing healthcare facilities are
invited to oppose and defeat a would-be competitor’s application.
This process results in a de-facto “certificate of monopoly” for
favored established businesses.

Consider entrepreneur and physician Dr. Mark Baumel. He wanted
to open several “one-stop shops” for colon health in Virginia that
would provide virtual colonoscopies along with same-day polyp
removal, just as he does at his flagship facility in Delaware.
Unlike Delaware, Virginia prohibits purchasing a CT scanner without
first obtaining a certificate of need. And yet, Virginia’s
Department of Health has denied Dr. Baumel a certificate of
need.

None of Dr. Baumel's potential competitors even offer the
service that he wants to provide. But they could. And
state health planners apparently think protecting existing
businesses from even the possibility of competition is more
important than patient access to potentially lifesaving
screenings.

Baumel is suing Virginia, with the help of the Institute for
Justice. See more Reason coverage of certificate-of-need
laws here
and
here.

Disclosure: I am a former employee of the Institute for
Justice.

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