Scientia est potentia

Canada and Somalia, can you tell the difference? Elizabeth Mandelman can’t.

As “documentary” film makers like Michael Moore are keenly aware, the medium and format used to present information makes a big difference in the level of credibility that people assign to it. Pulling information out of your hindquarters verbally in a casual conversation isn’t likely to convince anyone, but once it’s in print in the mainstream news media or a widely-distributed film, it has to be true.

In this case, the method of distribution of her propaganda is the only claim that Shelley Saywell has to authority. It’s the difference between being an political activist with a blog (like Elizabeth) and being – at least if we take Elizabeth’s word for it – some sort of expert on a wide range of geopolitical issues. There is a big difference between legitimate scholarship and ideological propaganda, and Elizabeth unwittingly mentions it no less than two paragraphs in:

In Devil’s Bargain, Saywell tracks the global small arms trade. Through the film, she illustrates the need for an international treaty to end the illegal flow of small arms, which fuels war and results in massive death and destruction.

Translation: we already know what we want, now let’s twist some facts and put some horrifying stories and images in front of you until you want it, too.

This is the problem with ideologues like Mandelman and Saywell. They aren’t concerned with the difficult social, economic and political intricacies of the human suffering they claim to address – they have their niche, their pet topic, their little soapbox and they insist on framing everything in those terms. They feed off of suffering, because without they would have no basis for their fear-mongering.

Fortunately, the links they constantly draw between their cause (civil disarmament) and the tragedies they hide behind for legitimacy are painfully weak, and easily shown to be false.

Let’s start at the end. If you starting reading Mandelman’s posting thinking it would be a stark condemnation of the Western aid programs that end up arming the combatants of countless wars in the 3rd world, you are wrong. If you thought the conclusion would be anything, even remotely related to the premise, you are also wrong. You see, it turns out that 3rd world conflicts that split on millennia-old racial and religious lines justify a registry of peacefully owned civilian arms in a wealthy, peaceful country whose closest thing to a civil war was a bunch of angry Frenchmen blowing up mailboxes (a crisis conveniently appropriated by Mandelman’s ilk to ban civilian ownership of automatic weapons).

For the uninitiated:

Map of the world, a difficult concept for some activists

In highlighting the differences between these countries, I defer to a source that tends to know a thing or two about geopolitical issues. No, not some no-name activist filmmaker. The Central Intelligence Agency.

Source: the Central Intelligence Agency World Factbook, 2008

But clearly, violence in the three countries closest to the right is all due to guns! I mean, it’s not like those people are starving and desperate, unable to find work, or caught in endless civil war because their national boundaries were drawn arbitrarily by departing colonists. Yet ideologues like Mandelman insist on framing these problems in terms of guns only, like war didn’t exist before guns, or like the current of stability of the Western world wasn’t won at the muzzle of a gun.

Just listen to what the “documentary” maker Saywell has to say:

In 1995 I made a film about rape as a weapon of war focusing on rape in the Balkans, and small arms and light weapons were a major contributor to that terror campaign. Women have no hope against armed men who have become inured to the violence and use the gun as a symbol of power and masculinity. I asked why rape had become so prevalent in war and “soft conflict” zones, and the answer was “rape inflicts maximum pain”, and therefore is the most powerful attack mechanism – with the least amount of risk to the perpetrator. The proliferation of guns, easy for any kid to use, have made this a daily occurrence in places like the Congo – where many women have been raped multiple times, Somalia, Darfur, and too many other places.

Small arms and light weapons were a major contributor to widespread rape? I would suggest that, despite the earnest efforts of some of my colleagues in the engineering field, small arms are not sentient and are in fact totally inert. They contribute to nothing except what those people who use them are involved in. They contribute to rape no more than those snappy Hugo Boss SS uniforms contributed to the Holocaust. The world has been a violent place long before the invention of the gun, in fact, it is far less dangerous today than it was a millennium ago when all we had to fear was the sword.

Wait, let me correct that. We never had to fear the sword, just like today we do not need to fear guns. What we have always feared are the violent people who wield them, and the difference between 2009 and 1009 is that today the concept of natural, universal rights – enforced by people and governments alike through the use of small arms and light weapons – can be used to keep these violent people at bay.

See, contrary to what Saywell says, it is not guns that “make” rape a daily occurrence. It is rapists, a society that makes rape an acceptable practice, and the lack of strong-willed (and heavily armed) individuals who would establish institutions to stop this plague. I dare say our Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan are rather better armed than any Somalis, yet they aren’t raping anyone. Why? Because they are the product of a civilized, advanced society built upon the concepts of peace, order and good government. Because they are accountable to a well established and perfectly functional criminal justice system. We are born to this legacy because our ancestors built it from nothing, with a whole lot of blood, sweat, tears, and several million rounds of .303 British. Every time someone tries to disarm the civilian population they are spitting on that legacy.

Something that's done a whole lot more for freedom and equality than any documentary

But I as mentioned at the outset, all the nonsense about 3rd world wars is not even Saywell’s point. She tries to link it back to Canada:

I believe that [guns make abusers feel more empowered]. I am making a film about domestic violence in the immigrant South Asian/Arab community here. In two of the stories I’m following the father/brother killed with a gun. In one case, the gun he used was being “stored for a friend”, in another – a cabbie, shot both of his daughters multiple times. Before that, he’d threatened them and their mother, shot out windows and car tires. He might still have killed them without the gun, but the link of its possession to his violence and anger can’t be overlooked. He felt powerless in our society, and the gun was a symbol of power to him according to his wife.

Say Shelley, don’t you think those abusers would feel a lot less empowered if you hadn’t disarmed everybody else? Criminals will only feel empowered by guns so long as they are the only ones with them. Guns are the greatest equalizer and have been since their invention. Firearms neutralized the advantage of heavily armed cavalry that could only be fielded by governments constituted of the wealthy upper classes. By putting the primary weapon of the day into a package that was obtainable, affordable and operable by the average citizen for the first time in history, firearms forever shifted the balance of power away from oppressive monarchies and into the hands of the people.

Without guns the Founding Fathers of the United States could never have written these world-changing words:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

Preamble to the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America, 1776

It is the gun that ushered in the age of governments that operated not by divine right or sheer force, but at the consent of the People. It’s proliferation is a symbol of that freedom and the prohibition of guns will be a harbinger of it’s decline.

But that’s not all. Saywell asserts that there is a causal relationship between possession of a firearm and the drive to commit violent crime. That is a sweeping statement that requires substantial proof. She offers none at all.

I have an idea, though. Notice how the Canadian domestic abuse Saywell is “investigating” is in the immigrant South Asian/Arab community. These are societies that are well known for widespread domestic violence (to an extent that is unimaginable in Canada). The nearly non-existent rights of women in Islamic countries (which is what I suspect Saywell is referring to in a PC way by saying “South Asian/Arab”) is not news. Yet when people emigrate from those countries and bring that degenerate culture with them, is it somehow the fault of guns?

Funny how the only link to Canada in all of this is in the backward sociocultural practices exported from foreign countries.

Saywell’s illogical arguments don’t end there.

When we measure COST we have to remember what these weapons do, in terms of individual terror and social instability. When I grew up we never heard of gun violence in Toronto – that was New York or Detroit or somewhere else. Now guns are becoming endemic. We need to spend whatever it costs to try to control and register legal guns – so that the illicit trafficking can be monitored and stemmed.

This is complete nonsense. As I pointed out in an earlier entry, gun violence has been declining since the 1970s. Saywell, like most gun control advocates, pays more attention the increasingly sensationalized news media than actual statistics. The trend of declining gun violence in Canada does not coincide with the introduction of any of our many gun control initiatives. Even though Saywell’s premise (that gun violence is increasing) is false, I will comment on her conclusion. This one is so far out there that I have to avail myself of some extraordinary formatting:

What on earth will controlling and registering legal guns do to combat illicit trafficking?

It’s downright bizarre. It doesn’t make any sense at all, and of course Saywell does not explain how this would work. The objective isn’t even rationally connected to the means she wants to use to accomplish it. I’ll tell you how it’ll work – it won’t. Saywell and Mandelman want it nonetheless, because their objective isn’t what they say it is. It’s the only thing all their plans do perfectly – get peacefully owned guns out of the hands of citizens.

Registration is the thin edge of the confiscation wedge, and nothing else.