The American Spectator

The Nation's Pulse

On Banning Things

By Lawrence Henry on 5.13.05 @ 12:07AM

The old NRA slogan says, "Guns don't kill people. People do." That's no fun, if you're a "lawmaker" -- odious name for a representative, isn't it? U.S. Representative Stephen F. Lynch (D-South Boston), "has filed a bill seeking to pull the controversial drug [painkiller Oxycontin] from the market," reported the Boston Herald Saturday, May 7.

In announcing his bill, Lynch referred to a recent robbery attempt in an Arlington, Massachusetts pharmacy. Two would-be thieves showed guns and demanded the druggist's Oxy stash. Lynch did not tell what happened next, which would have suited the NRA's purposes better than his. The pharmacist pulled an under-the-counter piece and blazed away at the robbers. The robbers shot back, then fled. Nobody got hit. No charges were filed against the gun-wielding druggist, who, the Arlington police noted, had a pistol permit and had been robbed before.

The story quoted an unintentional howler from a nurse who objected to Lynch's proposed ban. "(Oxycontin) has revolutionized comfort for many of my patients," the nurse said. Well, yes. Oxy is comfortable stuff. I've taken it myself after my most recent operation.

Here's another pregnant quote from Robin Hogen, vice president of public affairs for Oxycontin manufacturer Purdue Pharma, who objected to the Lynch bill. "You're really allowing criminals to dictate health care policy."

Tempting libertarian rant in there.

I WOULD NOT CALL thing-banners criminals. To get too serious about their philosophical and practical foolery itself risks more foolishness in turn. Carrie Nation was not a Communist. But boy, we do have a lot of Carrie types, and we have always had. Combine them with the Schumer sorts ("I have a passion for legislating") and you get a kind of horror-film creeping menace. It seems unstoppable.

A movement against drunk driving was probably in order. Some reduction in blood alcohol content (BAC) legal limits, too; it's down to .10 in most states. But now, as noted by John Doyle in an opinion column in the May 7 issue of the New Hampshire Union Leader, "Police have begun arresting people with a BAC at just a fraction of the legal limit." He cites three recent cases of arrests made for BAC levels of .03, .02, and, in one bust in Florida, a .00.

The decades-long battle to ban tobacco presents a sadly familiar stretch, from set-aside no-smoking areas in restaurants to citywide prohibitions. You can no longer smoke on windy Los Angeles beaches. My grandmother, who had herself signed a temperance pledge at the turn of the last century, used to love to sit near a man with a good cigar at a baseball game. Alas, there are open-air ballparks today that have never known the whiff, and never will.

Goofy all this thing-banning may be, but one must acknowledge the sinister as well. What is the ultimate thing, after all? Property.

THE INVALUABLE THEODORE DALYRYMPLE explains in a can't miss article in the latest City Journal, analyzing post-World War II collectivism in Great Britain.

After the war, building on the nationwide consensus and collateral good feelings that had developed from the coordinated war effort, British thinkers almost uniformly came to believe that government planning should be applied to creating peacetime prosperity and fellow-feeling. Wrong-headed as that notion may have been, the war being a unique experience, it captivated even such as George Bernard Shaw ("We are all socialists now") and the-then-yet-to-be disillusioned George Orwell.

Dalrymple:

Is it such a stretch from banning Oxycontin to embracing a planned economy? Not really. The impulse proceeds from the little to the bigger, as Dalrymple notes: "If we live entirely in the moment, as if the world were created exactly as we now find it, we are almost bound to propose solutions that bring even worse problems in their wake."

Take Oregon, for example. The lefty-greeny types there have passed laws over the years encouraging fuel-efficient automobiles. The citizens complied. Now comes the inevitable. The state's gasoline tax revenues are projected to start dropping as of 2014 as gas-sipper cars consume less fuel. So a state task force has recommended levying a per-mile tax on driving. Some 400 citizens in the college town of Eugene have volunteered to have GPS devices installed on their cars to monitor miles driven and to pay the per-mile tax. Such virtue!

For an example of "solutions that bring even worse problems in their wake," see the numbing discussion of tax alternatives in the lower paragraphs of this story this story by Seattle Times reporter Eric Pryne, published July 3, 2004 (yes, it's been going on that long). Sample:

Letter to the Editor

topics:
Health Care, Law