To Hell with Democracy. . . .

Now that the gun-registry vote has taken place I feel the need to say a few words about the whole affair. I, and I think many people, found a number of things disturbing in the whole process.

Firstly, I found the tone of the debate very troubling. The vitriolic, often angry, sometimes paranoid level of discourse (and it hardly qualifies for such a dignified word) on the part of those who object to the registry was odd, one might even say worrying. On the other hand, I understand why some of those who lost loved ones to guns might be very emotional and heated; rightly or wrongly many of them believe the registry saves lives like the ones they have lost and they are bound to become heated during the course of the debate. However, in a society where we are so accustomed to getting licenses and registering things, I certainly have trouble understanding the level of vitriolic and emotional objections that most anti-gun registry advocates demonstrated. I was constantly reminded of the Shakespeare quote "Methinks they do protest too much." And I have yet to hear a single good argument of why such a simple thing is so vile. But the nature of the debate got even uglier after the vote took place. Conservative spokespeople and bloggers called it a sham, a fraud, and I even read one blogger who called it a coup! Well Conservatives might call it a coup when the majority of representatives of the majority of the population vote in a certain way, but the rest of us call it democracy. And talk by the PM of "refusing" to accept the vote is genuinely frightening because it undermines the very principles of democracy. Furthermore, talk of Toronto "elites" by people who have 200 thousand dollar salaries and chauffeurs, is not only laughably ironic but does nothing but divide the country in ways that ultimate harms the whole nation.

Secondly, I was troubled by the underlying nature of the debate. Neo-Conservatism has been very successful in convincing people that everything in the realm of public policy must be quantifiable and have measurable and immediate results. This is, as I have said before, the colonization of normative debate by technical-rational discourse which the philosophers of the Frankfort School warned of several generations ago. The truth is that much law and public policy does not, and has never, worked this way. Take an issue like the anti-segregation movement that happened largely under the presidency of LBJ. The moves to integrate African-American children in all white schools was not public policy that had directly measurable results. In fact in many cases it actually inflamed racial tensions for some time rather than helping the overall race relations. But one of its intended goals was to change the way people reacted to the issue of race, to contributed to a change in what people considered acceptable or appropriate behaviour. Many types of public policy works precisely this way. And normative discourse should always take this kind of thing into account. Individual gun laws in themselves have very limited results in the quantifiable sense, rather they are intended to shift the way that people react to guns and gun ownership. Just like forced integration didn't suddenly make racists into nice tolerant people; rather, it helped to create an atmosphere in which younger people growing up were less likely to find racism acceptable.

Thirdly, I was very disturbed by the American nature of many of the anit-gun registry arguments. For example, the primary argument against registering guns has been that such a program is wasteful and doesn't actually have any effect. Now, the fact is that once the money has been spent to establish the registry(and it has) it is not particularly expensive to run. In fact, in relation to much of the country's policing costs, it is relatively cheap. But more importantly is the claim that registering guns doesn't do anything. The implication of this argument is that we should not register hand-guns either, this is very clear and it points to a huge hypocrisy on the part of Harper and gun-registry detractors. Why don't we hear them out there saying "I shouldn't I have to register my handgun?" If they believe that registering long-guns does nothing, then the same applies for handguns. But the Tories know it would be political suicide to make this argument. This is how we know that the whole argument on the part of Harper and his Cohorts is entirely disingenuous. The other American-style part of the argument is this idea that making people register guns is tantamount to "treating them like criminals." The NRA commonly makes this argument and it is bizarre and non-sensical, and only made in order to stir people's emotions. The fact is that no one "feels like a criminal" when they register their car. However, part of the reason that they register cars is to ensure that people registering them are not in fact violating the law in some manner. Furthermore, I don't hear throngs of right-wingers complaining that when they are searched to get on an airplane they are treated like criminals. Again this demonstrates the disingenuousness of the anti-gun registry arguments. But more than this is demonstrates a creeping Americanization of politics in which people throw around emotional and deeply divisive arguments solely to sway public opinion.

All of these things are troubling and speak to the various ways in which Harper's poisonous attitude is eroding democracy in this country and undermine genuine political discourse.

More to ADHR and Normative discourse. . . . .

With all due respect ADHR, I really don't think you understand what I have been saying. If I sounded arrogant, I appoligize, but this conversation brings up some serious emotions and I have been having this paradigmatic argument for so many years.

 Correlations DO in fact establish the point and sociologists since the foundations of modern social sciences from the time of Durkheim and Weber onward have established this point. And Habermas's contemporary work on both communicative action and Normative standards and the foundations of Law reiterate it over and over. Crime is almost always an over-determined act socially speaking and laws can very seldom be tied directly to the commitment of crimes. You cannot, for example "prove" that laws against murder slow the murder rate. Most legal arguments can only be meaningful against the backdrop of certain kinds of lifeworld (lebenswelt) assumptions or certain kinds of ideological constructs. As a result - in most cases correlation is not only the best kind of proof the social policy-maker has it is often the ONLY mechanism they have.

Your distinction concerning correlation and causal connection is simply wrong according to the mechanisms of most decent

social science and philosophy. It is the discourse of science and mathematics. Even though some social scientists have attempted (I believe with no success) to establish Coefficients of Correlation, these are not only too complicated but are not meaningful to normative and social discourse. This is clearly one of the things that Habermas established in the Theory of Communicative Action and one of the things that he has long fought against concerning the colonization of social discourse by technocratic discourse. Incidentally Feyerabend also did brilliant work in this area.

Connections between certain kinds of social behaviour and certain laws and social policies is in fact correlative not causal, period. Furthermore, the neo-conservative efforts to colonize all social policy making with absolute causal 'proofs'and quantifications is part of a nearly global and entirely disingenuous effort to create the appearance of necessity and technocracy, all the while being driven by fairly firm ideological efforts.

Of course, an issue like gun violence is over-determined and cannot be reduced to any single policy or social phenomenon. But if you need to get technical then this much is clear. No law, NONE, can be said to be causal since only individual actions by independent actors could appropriately be referred to as causal. Thus the great sociologists like Habermas have established normative discourse in terms of a complex web of determinates. Since one cannot "prove" that loose gun laws in the US have lead to the highest rates of gun crimes in the world, the sociologist is dependent upon another kind of discursive exercise. This is not "illogical" or faulty logical as your original comment implied. Rather it is a kind of normative discourse that depends on correlations and certain kinds of communicative actions. And since you, and no one else, can actually prove a causal relationship between any law and certain behaviors (a fact even many right-wing theorists have been at pains to establish) it is entirely disingenuous to demand such proof in normative discourse. Rather, it is a different kind of correlative and communicative mechanism that is demanded. I can no more 'prove' by technocratic standards that a gun registry will reduce gun crimes than you can 'prove' by the same standards that generous welfare causes the working class to be shiftless and lazy. And since no such mechanism of 'proof' exists you can choose to believe that there is no link between the loose gun control mechanisms in the US and the highest rate of gun violence in the world. There is in fact no causal link, properly so-called, only a correlative one.

We know, for example that in countries like the UK and Holland gradually established stronger mechanisms of gun-control, including registries, and gun-violence (particularly domestic violence involving guns) gradually declined more or less in line with the establishment of such controls. This is not causal, it is correlative. But hard logic and technocratic reason can still let you deny such links. But technocratic rationality doesn't actually belong in the realm of normative discourse and in my opinion technocratic rationality is largely and ideological illusion anyway, a position made clear by a long history of skeptics from Montaigne to Feyerbend. You failed, when you talked of the “empirical” question, to understand that I was in fact arguing that you cannot, in almost all cases, make such empirical connections within a region of normative discourse. In other words I am using an entirely different paradigm of discourse rather than the 'empirical' one. Furthermore, I am arguing that I explicitly reject the paradigm you are using because it is a technocratic colonization of normative discourse, which is not only useless but entirely disingenuous. And I am building this argument on the back of Weber's work on rationalization in Economy and Society, Horkheimer and Adorno in Dialectic of Enlightenment, and Habermas' work in Action, Theory of Communicative Action, Theory and Practice, and Between Facts and Norms.  (See also Luca Corchia's work on Explicative Models of Complexity)

Heather Mallick and Gun violence. . . . .

I don't usually devote a blog posting to the words of someone else but today is a good day to do so. Heather Mallick deserves our praise today. Now I have always been a tad suspicious of gun control because, though I am very far on the left of the political spectrum, I am  also a student of Thomas Paine and I have trouble trusting a government that is eager to keep as many guns as it can for itself and eliminate the rest. After the abuses by the military and the police in recent decades we should all be afraid of that and be lobbying for the elimination of ALL the guns as well as the existence of a standing army. That is why there is a certain irony, and dare I say hypocrisy, in arguing for gun control while at the same time tolerating and even promoting a culture of violence and machismo. Thus Ms Mallick is correct in pointing out in her article today the important gender issue that is being forgotten in the whole debate over the gun registry. Since the massacre at Montreal (may they all rest in peace) it should be obvious to anyone with any sense that violence against women is a central issue in the gun debate. And though compelling people to register long-guns will not end violence against women, and unfortunatly the murder of innocent women at the hands of men will continue, any tool in that fight is welcome and important. And since the majority of such incidents occur with legally obtained guns, how can anyone doubt that any contribution to the knowledge we have of where guns are and who has them can help in that struggle? To say that the gun registry is useless because it won't eliminate gun violence is like saying that a law against murder is useless because it hasn't ended murders.

But what I praise Ms Mallick for most today is reminding us that we have created and continue to promote a culture of violence. By all means, register guns, but while we are busy doing that let's stand against a culture where violence is pervasive in everything from video games to foreign policy and where politics has become almost the exclusive domain of a bullying culture of machismo. And while you are fighting this struggle, tell any NDP friends that you might have that it is time to look for a new leader.

The NDP and the Gun Registry . . . . .

I have to take a few moments out of my birthday to make a few remarks about the NDP and the gun registry because I just cannot stand listening to NDP party hacks who are defending the NDP MPs who have previously voted, and are again going to vote, to kill the gun registry. A number of critics and bloggers have been defending Jack Layton for allowing a free vote on the gun registry because it is a tradition to allow such free votes on so-called private members' bills. In fact some people have even gone so far as to claim that Layton is adhering to 'principle' because to do otherwise would be to abandon the tradition simply because the bill contravenes the policies and spirit of the party. Now this argument seems fairly lame to me simply because while this bill may be a 'private members' bill' de jure, it is de facto a government bill and everyone knows it.

But let us accept, for the moment, that argument and say this is a private members' bill and tradition demands that we have a free vote on this issue. We could then absolve Mr. Layton of any ill effects of the death of the gun registry and say that he, at least, acted in an appropriate manner. The problem is that this still leaves a bad taste in my mouth and it simply shifts the unprincipled behavior from the leader of the party to the individual MPs who vote to kill the registry. Because what possible 'principle' could these MPs be adhering to? There are only two possible principles that they could argue. One is that they don't believe "in principle" in the gun registry. This argument surely stretches the limits of credibility. Given the history of the party to which they belong and the fact that we live in a country where, in most municipalities, you have to register your dog, I find it incredible that a member of the NDP would object to registering a gun. The argument just won't do. On the other hand, one might argue that these MPs are adhering to some populist principle that suggests that MPs are morally bound to vote the way their constituents want them to vote. Now the NDP is not a populist party and we have a representative form of government rather than a direct democracy. I don't think the NDP MPs who are voting to kill the registry would vote to outlaw, say, interracial marriage or vote to eliminate all corporate taxes just because a majority of their constituents wanted them to. Thus, I think it is very clear that this argument also fails to convince.

There is, of course, one rather convoluted argument that these MPs and their supporters might appeal to in defense of their vote to kill the long-gun registry. The argument goes like this; if those MPs voted to maintain the long-gun registry in certain rural ridings, they would surely lose their seats in the next election, thus allowing Liberals and/or Conservatives to win more seats, weakening the NDP's presence in the House and, in the long run, undermining the overall influence and impact of the party and its concerns. This argument is, of course, not 'principled' but it is, rather, pragmatic. The argument depends on the idea that the negative impact of killing the registry is less important that the over all impact of having fewer NDP Representatives in the House. Though I am sometimes sympathetic to this kind of political pragmatism, I am not particularly sympathetic to the argument in this case. I find this kind of argument particularly distasteful because no one ever admits it. MPs don't talk to the media or their constituents and say "I don't agree with this bill but I am going to vote for it because I am being pragmatic and strategic." Thus the whole project seems disingenuous.

If one is going to argue against the long-gun registry 'on principle' then one has to have a fairly strong libertarian streak and would therefore be opposed to many, if not most, government registry programs. You could also oppose it based upon a principle concerning the potential oppressive nature of militarist governments but I don't think there are many making this argument. Thus I admit that while there are principled reasons to oppose the gun-registry, most people who actually oppose it are hypocrites because they are not actually libertarians and don't actually oppose many government powers and intrusions. On the other hand there are fairly strong 'principled' arguments, from the NDP point of view, to be found for supporting the long-gun registry. The registry allows us to keep much better track of the guns in society, most of the country's police forces suggest that it helps 'fight crime,' a majority of gun crimes involve long-guns, many of which are stolen and a registry allows us to know their origin etc. Furthermore, the registry in no way undermines anyone's rights, at least more than already existing registry programs for, say, pets or motor-vehicles, or numerous other things we possess.

The fact is that even if we are to absolve Mr. Layton of responsibility here, there are no credible 'principles' on which NDP MPs can hang their political hat if they are going to vote to kill the registry. And since they are not appealing to the 'pragmatic' argument, at least not publicly, I am compelled to believe that the only real motivation for NDP MPs voting to kill the registry is a self-interested one. These MPs are looking after their own political skins and saving their pensions rather than acting on some principle. And bloggers who are making vague attempts to defend the principles of these MPs are barking up the wrong tree and sounding rather pathetic if you ask me.

If certain NDP members are integral to the death of the long-gun registry, you don't have to blame Jack Layton. You can blame the individual members for being wrong headed and unprincipled. But more fittingly, I think we can blame the party as a whole which, this whole affair suggests, has lost its way and its moral compass. If the NDP is unable to stand up for something as relatively minor as the long-gun registry then this party has had its day.