Sunday, July 17, 2022
Cesare Beccaria on Gun Control
False is the idea of utility that sacrifices a thousand real advantages for one imaginary or trifling inconvenience; that would take fire from men because it burns, and water because one may drown in it; that has no remedy for evils, except destruction. The laws that forbid the carrying of arms are laws of such a nature. They disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes. Can it be supposed that those who have the courage to violate the most sacred laws of humanity, the most important of the code, will respect the less important and arbitrary ones, which can be violated with ease and impunity, and which, if strictly obeyed, would put an end to personal liberty—so dear to men, so dear to the enlightened legislator—and subject innocent persons to all the vexations that the guilty alone ought to suffer? Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man. [Cramer's emphasis omitted].
Source: Clayton E. Cramer, Concealed Weapon Laws of the Early Republic: Dueling, Southern Violence, and Moral Reform (Greenwood, 1999) pp. 5-6 quoting Cesare Beccaria, On Crimes And Punishments, trans. by Henry Palolucci (New York: Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1963), 87-88.
Labels: civil liberties, crime, critical thinking, freedom, guns, quotations
Indians in Ireland—Take III
In "Indians at home – Indians in Cornwall, Indians in Wales, Indians in Ireland" I wrote about how European settler-colonialism, particularly by the English, was first inflicted upon other European peoples in Europe well before it was exported to other continents. This should be obvious to anyone with more than a passing knowledge of European history. Alas, it appears this is not the case.
Below is an interesting quote that speaks once more to this subject. Of course, I do not endorse Leyburn's lessons allegedly "learned from hard experience".
This use of the Scots-Irish as shock troops in the New World was quite similar to how the English government had used Scots settlers in Ulster against the Irish:They lived on land in both regions that had often been forcibly taken from the natives. ... When the natives, whether Irish or Indian, refused to accept either the legality or the settlement, preferring rather to fight back by whatever means they could devise, the settlers fought equally hard to retain the homes and farms they had made by their own labor. They learned from hard experience that one must fight for what one has; that turning the other cheek does not guarantee property rights; in short, that might makes right, at least in the matter of life and land ownership.
Source: Clayton E. Cramer, Concealed Weapon Laws of the Early Republic: Dueling, Southern Violence, and Moral Reform (Greenwood, 1999) pp. 30-31 quoting James G. Leyburn, The Scotch-Irish, 147-148.
Labels: Empire, history, identity, Indians, Ireland, quotations, United States, White folks
