Orthogonal Musings

Via SondraK, I see this remarkable (and totally doomed) legislation in Vermont from Rep. Fred Maslack:

Maslack recently proposed a bill to register “non-gun-owners” and require them to pay a $500 fee to the state. Thus Vermont would become the first state to require a permit for the luxury of going about unarmed and assess a fee of $500 for the privilege of not owning a gun.
Maslack read the “militia” phrase of the Second Amendment as not only affirming the right of the individual citizen to bear arms, but as a clear mandate to do so. He believes that universal gun ownership was advocated by the Framers of the Constitution as an antidote to a “monopoly of force” by the government as well as criminals.

I checked Vermont’s constitution, and sure enough, Article 9 says (essentially) that all citizens are required to bear arms and “yield personal service, when necessary, or an equivalent thereto” to the aim of protecting life and property. It clearly assumes the default condition is for citizens to own weapons for the protection of themselves, their family, and their neighbors. And for those whose morals forbid bearing arms, the Vermont constitution clearly calls for an additional tax or fee to subsidize civil law enforcement in an unspecified form. That’s some heavy duty personal responsibility expected by Article 9, folks. I’d imagine it has even less chance of being accepted by any court than the Tenth Amendment of the US Constitution.
Now, I doubt Maslack’s real aim is to get this passed (the only actual news story I could find on this bill was from Britain). I’m sure he’s making some point about Second Amendment rights instead, and having a little fun watching the liberal heads explode around him. Good on him. I always prefer that legislators pursue hopeless ideas. It takes up their time when they could be passing actual laws, which are seldom congruent with actual good ideas.
But the article first brought to mind the following picture:

Of course, the Vermont Constitution was written before the invention of modern police departments, and we now pay taxes to sustain the gun-toting professionals in blue: A nearly universally accepted good idea, if your name ain’t Dillinger. But there is still a lot of debate over the value of an armed populace and the reduction in load on the police from such a populace. In my opinion, an armed citizenry is a huge deterrent to all sorts of crimes, petty and God-awful alike. This means my amusement at Rep. Maslack’s bill is “Ha Ha, stick it to ‘em!” rather than, “Ha Ha! What an ignorant miltia goon! Someone lock him up.”
So here’s the first orthogonal leap: Vermont Guns to National Healthcare Reform.
One of the shibboleths of the Health Care Reform crowd is the Mandate. They feel that if you don’t have insurance, you are an automatic drain on the system, since the law already requires that you get care no matter what your pocketbook says. Therefore, they pursue a mandate on everyone to carry insurance, to ensure that everyone does their part. Of course, the real reason for this is actuarial. They need more bodies in the system to make it pay. For most of the uninsured who are not here illegally, or who are not already eligible for government insurance but don’t sign up, insurance is a bad bet, and buying it will do little beyond subsidizing others. i.e. You have to carry a policy to protect your neighbors.
Sound familiar?
It seems that the go to argument for liberal blog commenters on this front, when confronted by those who do not wish to carry insurance, is to wave the Fire Department around in the air, saying, “How about the Fire Department, huh? Are they socialist too? Wanna privatize them?”
I always wondered why they almost never use the Police in similar fashion. But here’s a little mini-leap: Many of the same figures on the Left who are pushing Health Care Reform are the same types who spend considerable energy and time demonizing the cops in furtherance of keeping their constituencies in line.
It is fun to wonder how those same folks who claim that community responsibility is all that and a bag of chips when it comes to fires, would react when confronted with Maslack’s idea.
Maslack’s gun requirement is a lot more congruent with firemen than it is with Health Care. Fire departments serve the same broad function as police. They protect a lot more than the person suffering from the fire, and fires are in many ways like criminals. If not controlled they will seldom self-limit (especially in cities).
That’s why the control of fire and crime, i.e. being “protected in the enjoyment of life, liberty, and property”, and the Vermont Constitution puts it, makes sense as a government job, even in a far more capitalist society than ours. Fire and crime are always a crisis situation, unless a society bands together to control them. Universal heath care does not equate. Modern society will not completely break down and fail without health insurance for all. While I’m sure some who are too invested in the struggle for their own sanity would disagree, Health Care Reform is a political imperative (at best), but not a “civilization will collapse otherwise” imperative.
But this leads me to a second leap.
Free Rides and Health Care merge in my mind, and out pops another hobby horse: Vaccinations. The current trend toward not vaccinating your child is a horrifically bad one. Many parents don’t understand how dangerous many childhood diseases are, either due to the ignorance of the supposedly educated, or due to insanely warped research. Many others quietly feel that they can opt out, since the diseases are generally well controlled by everyone else getting vaccinated. The people are Free Riders of the most odious stripe. For a far better description of why you are callously endangering my vaccinated children if you don’t vaccinate yours than I can muster, try this Popular Mechanics article on for size:

Only it’s not that easy. While the measles vaccine protects virtually everyone who is inoculated, not all vaccines have the same rate of success. But even if a vaccine is effective for only 70, 80 or 90 percent of those who take it, the other 30, 20 or 10 percent who don’t get the full benefit of the vaccine are usually still not at risk. That’s because most of the people around the partially protected are immune, so the disease can’t sustain transmission long enough to spread.
But when people decide to forgo vaccination, they threaten the entire system. They increase their own risk and the risk of those in the community, including babies too young to be vaccinated and people with immune systems impaired by disease or chemotherapy. They are also free-riding on the willingness of others to get vaccinated, which makes a decision to avoid vaccines out of fear or personal belief a lot safer.

The effect described here is called “herd immunity”.
Let’s leap back to the original idea of the gun requirement, and my contention that a population that is at least commonly armed will lead to a considerable reduction in the number of men who take up crime as a profession. If a significant amount of the populace are armed, crime becomes a more dangerous profession. Dangerous professions are less attractive, if you had not heard. Even the Vikings largely gave up their raids when they ran out of unarmed communities to prey upon. Good police forces and armed citizens are like vaccines against crime. It is hardly socialist to mandate one, or the other, or both, depending on your societal construct.
Getting your kids vaccinated is something you owe your neighbor and their children, forget what you think about for yourself. If you don’t do it, my daughter might die, along with lots of others. I have a right to expect you to take reasonable action to protect society. If you don’t get health insurance, I might have to economize elsewhere to afford my family’s care. There is a difference.