Ramon Espinosa / AP

When can you trust the state?  Never.  It’s a hard lesson to learn, made even more terrible by circumstances beyond anyone’s control.  Nearly five years after Hurricane Katrina, I still remember how cops manhandling an elderly woman and confiscating her gun — her only means of self-defense in a city gone mad.  And then there was the murder of two unarmed civilians on the Danziger Bridge, which the New Orleans police later tried to cover up.

You can’t trust the state, even when it appears no one else can save you.   And now survivors of the terrible earthquake in Haiti are learning the same, painful lesson:

More than two months after the earthquake that devastated Haiti, at least 30 survivors who were waved onto planes by Marines in the chaotic aftermath are prisoners of the United States immigration system, locked up since their arrival in detention centers in Florida.

These are not criminals — just people overwhelmed by the quake and subsequent aftershocks, looking for food, water and shelter.  When the Marines evacuated them, they were under the impression that they could join relatives already in the U. S., but instead they were immediately arrested and held for deportation by Immigration and Customs Enforcement — despite a current suspension of deportations to Haiti.  All of this, because they didn’t already have a piece of paper from the U. S. government granting them permission to come here.  And yet more immigrants have all but disappeared into ICE’s detention center network, with family unable to find them.  Some that were lucky enough to be freed were granted tourist visas, allowing them to stay for a short while, but not to work.

But even when their loved ones are put in cages for no reason by the government, people can’t seem to let go of their implicit trust of the state:

The government’s actions have been especially bewildering for the survivors’ relatives, like Virgile Ulysse, 69, an American citizen who keeps an Obama poster on his kitchen wall in Norwalk, Conn.  Mr. Ulysse said he could not explain to his nephews, Jackson, 20, and Reagan, 25, why they were brought to the United States on a military plane only to be jailed at the Broward center when they arrived in Orlando on Jan. 19.

The cognitive dissonance of that paragraph is almost dazzling: an Obama supporter who doesn’t understand why the Obama-led government jailed his nephews.  Even with the boot on their neck, people still look to the state to save them.  Will they ever learn?

Never trust the state.

[Cross-posted from The Libertarian Standard]

On to the Daily Cuts:

148. After a six-year battle with the Feds over obscenity charges, two porn film entrepreneurs plead guilty to reduced charges, earning them up to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine, a far cry from the five decades they faced on the original indictment.  As Jacob Sullum points out, the prosecutor, U. S. Attorney Mary Beth Buchanan, “seems to be a sincere moral crusader and therefore a public menace”.

149. Even though members of their own party seem lukewarm on the idea, it appears that the Obama administration still doesn’t have enough on its plate, and wants to add a revival of the Federal assault weapons ban.  This time it’s not for the children, but for the poor Mexicans caught in the crossfire of a vicious drug war.  Of course, if we Americans would just stop being such loser dope fiends, we wouldn’t need a drug war in the first place.

150. A Congresswoman from Ohio introduces a real clunker of a bill: $5,000 for any car you can drag to a dealership, to be applied towards the purchase of a new car.  Of course the automakers are supportive of this boondoggle.

151. Comic relief: What, would you rather have the cops kicking in your door?

Allow me to toss a glass of cold water on these hopeful musings.

It’s true that D. C.’s gun ban did nothing to reduce its murder rate.  Chicago, which banned handguns in 1982, continued to see its murder rate rise, reaching a peak of 33.9 per 100,000 in 1992 before dropping (and it has dropped dramatically, to as low as 15.6 per 100,000 in 2004).  But it’s still nearly three times the national average.  And the large drop in the murder rate has been attributed more to intensive policing tactics in high-crime areas than to the gun ban.

Conversely, it’s inconclusive that lifting restrictions on guns acts as a deterrent to violent crime, at least in urban areas.  Texas has perhaps the most relaxed gun laws in the nation, but its largest city, Houston, saw a dramatic spike in its murder rate following an influx of refugees from New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina (but it has started to decline this year).  Michigan liberalized its permit requirements in 2002, but Detroit ranks first in the country in homicides, at more than 47 per 100,000.  Whether in the hands of law-abiding citizens or criminals, it isn’t the presence of guns that drive violent crime.  It just happens to be the tool of choice for those who perpetrate crimes, and where legal, those who wish to defend themselves.

Dreaming about a substantial drop in D. C.’s murder rate as a result of Heller, then, ignores all the other factors that can contribute to crime: high population densities, low incomes, crumbling public infrastructure, poor educational systems, family deterioration, drug addiction, etc.  Solving these problems requires a far more nuanced policy approach than simply banning guns or allowing them anywhere.  And the statistics do make clear that of all the tools state and local governments have to fight crime, restrictive gun laws are among the least effective.

Other approaches, such as the “broken windows” tactics used by police in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and Denver, have had a lowering effect on those cities’ violent crime rate, though not always on murder itself.  But that, too, comes at a cost of civil rights violations and even more disturbing, the rapid militarization of local police departments.  Former NYC mayor and Presidential also-ran Rudy Giuliani often touts his “get tough” attitude on crime, ignoring the fact that arrests for petty drug offenses skyrocketed during his tenure, and disproportionately targeted minorities, among other abuses perpetrated by city police.

What, then, can we really expect as the fallout from Heller?  Probably not a magical drop in crime in the country’s inner cities, and certainly not over the short term.  There are still many policy issues regarding gun regulation to sort out, and it will probably take many more years of litigation to resolve them.  None of the solutions to fighting violent crime will come easily.  But the simplest policy, the one that politicians grasp for when they need a populist feather for their cap—abrogating an individual’s right to self-defense which has existed long before the Second Amendment was enshrined in the Constitution—is the worst solution of all.